Whether in Washington or Bangor, the axiom “the business of government is business” rings loud and clear. The Bangor City Council will likely grant good neighbor Wal-Mart a building permit to expand its operation. Similarly, Brewer government representatives salivated at the disclosure that a new Wal-Mart is on its way to their town.

Greed and self-interest prevail over the common good. Out-of-state developers and local private landowners, in the name of private property rights, can finally cash in on their claim for the good life.

Company attorney Jay Weinberg and community relations spokesman Keith Morris have engaged in a score of battles over the last decade with local citizens as they strive to reach their 2004 goal of constructing a new Wal-Mart every business day of the year. These Wal-Mart representatives justify expansion by highlighting annual revenues and packed parking lots asserting that the retailer is simply meeting market demand.

Weinberg asks, “What’s the difference between 20 stores lined up one by one or a Wal-Mart?” His self-satisfied response: “the interior walls, that’s the only difference.” During the airing of a public broadcasting special titled “Store Wars,” Weinberg seemed genuinely confused by the organized opposition to Wal-Mart. The battle over construction of a super Wal-Mart reflects a struggle over values that dates to at least the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to the White House and the globalization of American free trade.

Put aside, for the moment, the myriad of arguments against Wal-Mart documented and printed on the pages of the Bangor Daily News and focus instead of the concerns expressed by Howard Carter, a shoe store owner from Warrenton, Va., and a casualty of Wal-Mart’s predatory policies. Carter noted that the demise of his small business killed a sense of civic heart and soul in Warrenton; that small local businesses do more than sell products and pay taxes. Because they are a part of the fabric of the community they appreciate the social bonds of duty and responsibility that bind them to the larger whole. What Morris and Weinberg fail to grasp is that people like Carter are speaking of intangibles. It is the difference between form and substance.

When Weinberg asserts that no one should be precluded from having the opportunity to shop at Wal-Mart he is echoing the ethic of insatiable self-satisfaction promoted by Ronald Reagan in 1980; an ethic that implicitly contends that consumers, in a free market, possess the unfettered and dutiless rights and freedom to satisfy their every want at any costs whether they be environmental, social, or economic. Weinberg, Morris and certain property rights advocates underscore this pervasive ethic in our modern culture; an ethic that suggests individual rights and unimpeded gratification supersede the bonds of civic, environmental and social responsibility.

We have regressed to a market society that knows the price of everything and the value of little. Our business practices and economic polices in a free trade, free market global economy are perceived as amoral frozen in the annual corporate profit reports to investors. There is little thought about collective or individual consequences for our consumptive behavior. We deny that each dollar spent to gratify a want is a political moral action.

When we purchase products that are manufactured by sweatshop labor under oppressive “democratic” or authoritarian governments and which further destroy our environment, we are implicitly endorsing the policies of indifference, greed and exploitation.

Whether we like it or not, we are bound to the Morrises and Weinbergs of the world as well as to the Chinese child or adult who is compelled out of impoverished desperation to work under horrendous conditions for servant wages.

We may opt to ignore our civic and moral tie and responsibility to our fellow human beings and to our environment but we do so at our own emotional, psychological, spiritual, and inevitably, physical peril.

James L. McDonald, Ph.D. lives in Bangor.