Wal-Mart is hated by some people for the very reasons others love it.  Liberals and leftists hate it because they allege Wal-Mart’s substandard wages turn employees into helots.  Libertarians and some conservatives love it because Wal-Mart, expanding like the Blob, represents no-borders planetary capitalism.  Wal-Mart is McDonald’s, only supersized.

Whatever one’s opinion, a recent article in the New York Times invites a few observations, not least of which is that Wal-Mart is much more dangerous and destructive than libertarians and some conservatives think.  The Times disclosed that the American Enterprise Institute collected $100,000 from the Walton Family Foundation in 2004, and the Heritage Foundation has garnered $20,000 since 2000.  The Pacific Research Foundation got $175,000 from 2000 to 2004.  These are hardly astronomical sums, considering that AEI’s annual budget is $24 million; Heritage, the Wal-Mart of think tanks, slurps down $40 million each year.  These “conservative” groups say they would write in support of Wal-Mart regardless of donations, which may well be true; they blindly support the capitalist model Wal-Mart represents.  It is equally plausible that Wal-Mart conservatives invite donations by supporting such corporate giants and their quest to dominate global markets.

For a moment, forget the donations and pro-Wal-Mart editorials.  They are only part of the real problem with Wal-Mart.  As the Times does not report, Wal-Mart and its fellow titans are, in profound ways, enemies of American culture and prosperity.  If you accept, for a moment, merely for the sake of argument, that Heritage and AEI are conservative, you might just ask what other groups suckle at Wal-Mart’s teat.  The Times slyly conflated the Walton Family Foundation with Wal-Mart itself, but a glance at Wal-Mart’s corporate foundation paints a different picture.

According to the Capital Research Center, the corporate side of the Walton empire shoveled nearly $750,000 to leftists in 2004, compared with $2,500 to “conservatives.”  None of this, of course, shows up on the foundation’s website.  Among the recipients were the NAACP ($60,850), AARP ($3,750), the Izaak Walton League ($2,250), LULAC ($12,000), the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($10,000), and Planned Parenthood ($2,500).  The biggest recipient of Wal-Mart money?  The National Council of La Raza, at a cool $630,000.

La Raza (“The Race”) is the radical “Latino” organization that is aiding and abetting, by supporting illegal immigration, the Mexican reconquista of the American Southwest.  La Raza is uprooting English as the national language, plowing under American history and heroes, and planting Mexican-“Latino” culture, like so much maize, in the fertile ground of American public schools.  Recently, Wal-Mart dumped spokesman Andrew Young, the black former mayor of Atlanta, for spouting unwise and unkind remarks about Jews and foreigners who supposedly exploit inner-city blacks.  Yet the company merrily subsidizes “The Race.”  La Raza travels with baldly racist organizations that seek reconquista, the targets of which include Washington and Oregon.  What will happen to the Wal-Marts in Seattle and Portland after the reconquista is anyone’s guess, but whatever the answer, we can now see the problem with Wal-Mart.  In its single-minded pursuit of profits, the company funds organizations that undermine American culture, traditions, law, and sovereignty.

This, in turn, points to the problem with capitalism on the Wal-Mart scale.  To continue growing, Wal-Mart, like any cyclopean, globe-straddling corporation, must ingratiate itself not only with the political elites who rule the local, state, and federal regulatory bureaucracies, but with the cultural elites—in this case, the leftists using Wal-Mart’s ill-conceived largesse to peddle multiculturalist and open-borders ideology.  These leftists and the illegal immigrants who love them would destroy the culture and economic system that created Wal-Mart.  Sadly, the libertarians and “conservatives” who adore Wal-Mart, and believe its always-low-price bric-a-brac are manna for Middle America, apparently are as comfortable with Wal-Mart’s philanthropic treachery as the leftists who oppose Wal-Mart’s alleged predatory wage-and-pricing practices.  Yet, if the enemies of American prosperity and culture whom Wal-Mart supports attain their goals, the libertarians and “conservatives” won’t have a Wal-Mart to adore or a country in which to adore it.  That middle America will be gone.  Neither Wal-Mart nor its worshipers care that a free-market economy requires consumers who appreciate and understand a free-market economy and love their country, including the laws and culture that create them.  The culture creates the economy.  Destroy the culture, destroy the economy.

So Wal-Mart is akin to McDonald’s: It is the apotheosis of everything wrong with America.  Entering the maw of a Wal-Mart is creepy.  Any normal person over the age of 40 viscerally feels, as the cornucopia of junk and tatterdemalion illegal immigrants who shop there deluge his eyes, that something is horribly wrong beneath the garish consumerism and materialism.  Well, something is wrong.  The company knows no loyalty.

Wal-Mart is a corporate citizen of the world no more loyal to the land in which it grew than La Raza and the other leftists on Wal-Mart’s dole.  The Times fortuitously revealed that libertarians and “conservatives” applaud Wal-Mart’s bankrolling of the ideology that will ultimately destroy us.  Most importantly, as with all business partnerships between the ideological and corporate elites, the rest of us have no say in the matter.

Wal-Mart is subsidizing the destruction of America.  Libertarians and so-called conservatives support the endeavor.  Some of us dare call that treason.