The Colossus of Bentonville

Wal-Mart is an economic leviathan that exploits every conceivable advantage of the world economy to deliver products at cheap prices to the down-market segments of society.

The retail colossus is responsible for a huge chunk of the U.S. trade deficit. They utterly destroy many local businesses when they build each store. They brutalize suppliers until labor costs are contained by overseas outsourcing. And many overseas partners are oppressive, anti-democratic regimes whose "unions" are government goons in cahoots with Wal-Mart.

Those are just the facts. Onto the opinion.

If prices are everything, lets reverse engineer Wal-Mart prices to show consumers exactly where and how the materials and labor for each good were produced. Just like "Nutritional Information" had to be expanded to give consumers a better idea how much crap they've been eating, we need more context and explanation for price.

Do this by lopping off Wal-Mart's famous razor-thin margins, and showing true numbers on how much of the cost for that $12.97 handbag went to U.S. workers and companies, and how much of it went to countries without any meaningful trace of democracy. Geek these numbers into a database with all of the publicly-available information on supplier agreements and international wage statistics, matched against the actual prices for products on Wal-Mart's website.

If democracy is truly worth dying for, even on behalf of others, don't we have a right to know how much of it went into a DVD player?