Walgreens blame the poor for their own greed.
And other lies corporate media tells for shareholder profits.
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.
The late George Carlin’s words, about the true owners of the country, have never rang truer than what we’re seeing with the current supply chain breakdown—general malaise of the working population as things get harder and harder to afford with rising inflation and a falling US dollar. Then there’s the odd Hunger Games like separation between the ruling class partying on private islands, attending $30k a plate Met Gala events with performative body art,
and a news apparatus made up of Men’s Warehouse manikins, with about the same personality (thanks Max Blumenthal for that joke ), that is totally disconnected form the reality of the average US citizen. Not to mention, with our social media algorithms involved in essentially cognitive warfare, I wasn’t surprised to see the corporate media sink to a new low and find another way to divide the 99% into new and unique slices of artificial antagonisms.
Waking up to this story from the New York Times, we see the newest stoking of division to be among thieves. I’m not talking about the corporate thieves whose crimes of wage theft, tax evasion and gifting of tax money in the form of subsidies as not only sanctioned but encourage by the state and the subsequent bourgeois rule of law it has written for it’s ruling class.
Here we have the wonderful Walgreens corporation, which has decided to close stores in the San Francisco Bay Area citing “theft” as the reason.
Now, four months later, Walgreens says it will close that store and four others in San Francisco next month, citing what it described as a continuing problem of “organized” shoplifting in the city.
“Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco,” Phil Caruso, a spokesman for Walgreens, said in an email on Wednesday. “Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average.”
In a well documented and educational twitter thread, user Alec Karakatsanis lays out the duplicity of the article.
Citing the San Francisco incidents as the reason for store closures in their press release, The New York Times, willfully ignorant or negligent in their journalistic duty, lacking journalistic integrity, leaves out the most important part of the “theft.”
—That Walgreens is going to close 150 stores across the country to save shareholders 3.3 billion dollars.
(Photo for redundancy, in case the tweet gets taken down)
The sheer audacity that a multibillion dollar company would deflect it’s poor performance in light of being dominated in financial performance by an equally evil CVS/Aetna alliance, shows the lows these corporate goons and their puppets in mainstream corporate media will go to shift the blame to others. Their bottom line is suffering, so they blame the poor and make up an “organized theft” ghost, instead of investigating the reality of the company’s decisions.
Essentially Walgreens Boots is saying in social terms “We’re gonna say shoplifting is the reason we’re closing 150 stores, destroying thousands of jobs, removing necessary access to pharmacy services in the most at risk and in-need neighborhoods, and it’s because the poor are stealing, in the grand scheme of their holdings, what amounts to peanuts to an 82 billion dollar company—here, shareholders, are 3.3 billion dollars in dividends, we present to you on plates of gold. Oh and we blamed the poor to do it.”
Disgusting.
This is coming from a company that had to pay out $256 million in a fraud (theft) settlement in 2019. Fined 7.9 Million, from the DoJ itself, in Medicare inducement fraud (theft) in 2012. And is heavily subsidized by the American tax payer generally while trying somewhat successfully to avoid paying it’s fair share of taxes back to the source of much of its wealth.
But sure, go off on how petty theft is causing store shut-downs. Just like the rest of these major corporations, during this crisis of capitalism, as regular as the bowl movement propaganda the NYT shits out on their behalf. Walgreens is liquidating, not for the sake of it’s customers, but for the sake of it’s owners.
This is only the beginning of massive austerity and liquidation we’ll see in the future as the falling dollar coupled with mass inflation and supply chain disruptions continue to haunt the American economy. Perhaps it’s time to restructure for real, and build an economy for the worker, by the worker. After all, we’re the ones who actually make society run.
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