Much of the produce was still grown within a few miles and did not require chemical preservatives to survive the vast distances that it must travel today in massive trucks on the massive roads that centralisation of production and distribution by necessity demands.

Shopping, like most daily experience, was human scale with human contact. You were still a person, not a number, or, as today, a 'consumer'. We must protect the 'consumer' I hear the dark suits say. The 'consumer' wants this, the 'consumer' wants that. In fact, the 'consumer' is told what it wants, hypnotised into compliance via conscious and subconscious advertising, much of it subliminal, and the manipulation of its perception and reality.

The stores themselves are laid out in line with endless 'market research' to establish the most efficient ways to part the 'consumer' from its money. Seventy per cent of supermarket purchases are decided after the 'consumer' has entered the store and often bear little resemblance to the list it made in the kitchen before it left. Such is the power of mind control, for that is what it is. Blatant and merciless.

'I only came in for a bottle of milk ...'

I use the term 'it' with regard to the 'consumer', because that is what we are to the corporate beast - an 'it', a thing, a card-carrying black hole to suck its products from the shelves and hurry back for more. You consume, therefore you are.

We are simply there to be mentally, emotionally, and, therefore, financially raped by the insatiable monsters the supermarkets have become all over the world. To study their grotesque activities is to see the entire global system in microcosm. The supermarkets, and their even more gluttonous offspring, the 'megastores', tick every box.

They present themselves as the kind, gentle uncle, rocking back and forth on the chair in the porch, smiling benevolently. He's such a lovely man who cares so much for everyone and everything. He brings you 'quality you can trust', he 'respects and protects wildlife', his 'daily deliveries ensure freshness', and his only reason for being is to serve you and your family. He even cuts his prices to the bone because he only wants to help.

You know all this because there are signs all over his friendly little superstore in every little neighbourhood telling you that this is who and what he is. Don't worry, the Inc. is really an Unc. Even the celebrities of stage and screen love him so much that they take his megabucks to suck on uncle's phallus and tell us all how good it was. 'Every little helps', the celebrity whores parrot as they sell their soul to deliver the catchphrase of Tesco, the All-Mighty God of British shopping.

Good old Uncle Tesco, good old Uncle Wal-Mart. Oh, how we love you, you kindly, cuddly old gents.

The truth is rather different. The supermarket chains - ultimately 'chain' - are as much a Mafia as anything you will find in Sicily or New York. They employ hitmen and bully boys to enforce their will and millions of families live in daily fear from their brutal intimidation.

These families are called 'suppliers' and where the Italian Mafia use the knife and the gun, the supermarkets employ the phone, the fax and the email and an army of macho and masochistic thugs known as 'buyers'. They are professional bullies hired by Uncle to turn farming into slavery.

'I came for the job as a buyer.'

'Do you have a heart?'

'What's that?'

'When can you start?'

These men from Uncle are usually in their 20s and early 30s. They're powered by testosterone and often know little about the products they buy or what it takes to produce them. They care even less. Their god is called 'Bottom Line' and to them there is nothing else, no sense of fairness, justice, morality or humanity. Having any one of those values would be a fatal career move.

Tesco talks about being 'committed to maintaining strong mutually advantageous relationships with our suppliers'. Asda, owned by Wal-Mart, claims to believe in 'good relationships, which we work to improve all the time'. Another of Britain's 'Big Four', Sainsbury's, says it is 'very proud of the good relationships we have with our suppliers'.

All bullshit, of course. These people are protection racketeers. They protect and advance their 'market share' by squeezing their suppliers until the pips squeak.

This is key to the global system as a whole. To control it you need a monopoly, not the free market you claim to expound and represent. 'We are showing that competition brings down prices - it's just the free market at work.' If only it were. The whole Satanic edifice is built on rampant exploitation - of customers, suppliers and staff.

The supermarket giants prosper on the principle of pile 'em high and sell 'em fast' and their biggest 'sell' is price. They 'compete' within what is actually a cartel by selling at the lowest prices, but not at their own expense, oh no.

The price cutting comes courtesy of squeezing their suppliers dry, manipulating their customers to buy more than they want or need, and screwing their staff in terms of fair wages and conditions. That way everyone is exploited except them and this is how cutting prices leads to incredible profits.

They sell enormous numbers of products at a staggering rate to produce the billions they make every year. In 2006, Wal-Mart had sales of $345 billion from its 6,779 stores in 13 countries. Together, the sales and profits of the leading chains are beyond belief.

The sheer scale of their buying power has allowed them to undercut the local stores that preceded them and increasingly their smaller corporate rivals. This has led to the opposite of 'competition' and the 'free market'. It has led to monopoly by the few - the very situation that the shadow people behind the Orwellian global state wish to impose in every area of life. One British supplier described how he had once negotiated with some 45 different retailers, independent shops, wholesalers and markets. Now he was left with just four supermarket giants.

He is now, by design, at their mercy and if he doesn't break the Olympic record when they say 'jump', he has no business. This is where the whole system is being manipulated to go. Much of it is already there.

It means that 'Uncle' can do what he likes - and he does. Farmers and other suppliers are forced to the bone by the prices the supermarkets are prepared to pay and 'no' is never an answer. Nor do they deal in long-term contacts with the suppliers, often they have no contract at all, just a word of mouth or an email.

This gives the supermarket Mafia the ability to drop people whenever they like with no comeback whatsoever. Another destroyed business, another destitute family, who gives a shit? This growers experience is typical:

'We had planted 20 acres of beetroot. We had lifted half of it, when suddenly the chain decided to stop selling this beetroot line. Just like that, we got a phone call saying the chain couldn't take any more beetroot. They had given us a programme for 12 months but we had nothing in writing. All because the buyer, a 25-year-old lad, had decided not to stock it. What are you meant to do with 10 acres of beetroot all of a sudden?'

They couldn't care less, mate. Another supplier was told that his Brussel sprouts were being rejected on the grounds of quality while he was still digging them up. They had never even seen them, but what they decree is what happens, no matter what the facts are or the injustice may be.

Not only do they employ buyers for their lack of morality and fair play, they make sure they never work in one product area for very long so they don't have time to make relationships with suppliers that might possibly trigger some humanity by understanding the plight of their victims. A supplier told an official investigation into supermarket activities:

'Multiples switch their buyers around every six to 12 months in order that relationships and loyalty to suppliers can be avoided. The new buyer is given carte blanche to de-list suppliers, who are frequently treated with complete contempt.'

Another supplier described the buying teams as 'just a bunch of thugs', a common description, and, like all dictators, no-one is allowed to challenge their will. Richard Haddock, a British beef farmer, described how he stood up at a supermarket producers' meeting to list his bad experiences of working with supermarkets and shortly afterwards he was told they could no longer use him as a source of beef. 'Because I had spoken out publicly, they couldn't take my meat any more', he said.

A supermarket supplier negotiates the price

As a result of the pressure from supermarkets to supply for basically no profit, the farming industry in Britain and elsewhere is in desperate straits and, with other potential markets already destroyed by the monopolies, they wait every day in fear of the phone call or email either dropping them or demanding more cuts in prices that will finally send them out of business anyway.

Indeed, it goes even further. If these bullying buyers are not meeting their cost targets as the financial year approaches, they will demand that farmers give retrospective discounts on goods already long sold in the supermarkets. If they don't, they're fired. In the face of these monumental pressures, suicide rates among farmers are running at extraordinary and record levels. Good old Uncle Tesco, good old Uncle Wal-Mart. As one writer put it:

'Supermarkets like to portray themselves as the ultimate proponents of dynamic free-market capitalism. But these days they bear more resemblance to the feudal barons of medieval times, ruthlessly abusing their monopolistic power and turning their suppliers into little more than vassals.'

The consequences of all this for freedom and wellbeing are fantastic. It means that a few corporations control the global food chain from plough to plate, as they do with all the other commodities and resources. Farmers and other suppliers in the world's poorest countries are treated with the same ruthless inhumanity as those in the 'west', in fact even more so. Most of their lands are owned by the corporations, anyway, just as the banks are the real owners of most European and North American farms that have still eluded the other transnationals.

And the banks are ultimately owned by the same people who own or control the food, oil, pharmaceutical, bio-tech and media corporations. The trash about 'free trade' and the 'free market' is just a smokescreen for unfettered monopoly and an excuse to stop countries and people defending themselves from such monopoly.

The supermarket monsters are fakes and frauds at every turn. They centralise distribution so that thousands of articulated trucks are needed to crisscross countries on ever-expanding road systems funded by the taxpayers that they shaft at the checkout.

They have replaced shops that you could walk to with vast centralised stores outside of towns and cities that you need a car visit. Their very structure and mode of operation has generated pollution on an immense scale.

Yet they claim to be 'caring for the environment' because they sell you a plastic 'bag for life' with a few extra points on your loyalty card if you use it more than once.

The supermarkets are criminal syndicates, Al Capones with a shopping trolley, and they are truly children of the Orwellian state.

Their loyalty cards and other databases log and analyse your every purchase to produce a 'consumer profile' designed to target you with products they believe you might buy - even if you had never thought of it yourself. This includes noting which shopping aisles you never or rarely visit and sending you details of what you are not buying there.

How appropriate that when the UK government wanted advice on its planned identity card system it turned to ... Tesco.

Not content with destroying the competition in food, they are now moving into all areas of retailing. Independent bookshops are going out of business because they can't compete with the buying power, and therefore the selling price, of the supermarket dictatorships. It is the same with all the independent businesses that sell what the supermarkets do.

You name it, the supermarkets probably sell it, or soon will, and the suppliers get the price they are told they will get. The Führer has spoken, now salute and be grateful. You will sell it to someone else? Er, there is no someone else, remember?

And what will happen to prices for 'consumers' once all significant competition has been vanquished? At that point the consumer will become the new supplier. 'You don't want to pay that price, well go somewhere else then. Oh, I forgot, there is nowhere else, heh, heh'.

The natural outcome of this corporate greed, gluttony and sickness of the mind can now be seen in the UK as Tesco buy out what are left of the small local shops to impose their 'Tesco Express' chain where once individual people ran individual stores with their own individual shop fronts.

Tesco's gawdy 'corporate image' can be seen in picture postcard locations to spoil the feel and individuality of once unique streets that had held back the tide of corporate Nazism until now.

Oh yes, local people protest and local councils tell them to remove the corporate imaging until they have received planning permission, but whether they do or not is related to the level of adverse publicity that the protests attract. Image is all to Tesco, as it is to all frauds.

Local authorities are often loathe to take on Uncle Tesco, that friendly old guy with the AK 47. Tesco has far more money than they could ever muster and an army of corporate lawyers who will keep the case in the legal process for years. Add to this the fact that Tesco and their like have governments in the back pocket and what Tesco wants, Tesco invariably gets.

As they might say of corporate corruption and greed: 'Every little helps'.