Why
Overcoming
Consumerism?
Imagine yourself dwelling in the following
world:
You live in a safe, pleasant and unpolluted community where you
actually know and interact with your neighbors, be it a small
town, a suburb or even a city neighborhood. You can easily walk,
bicycle or take effective mass transit to your nearby job or school, which gives you
time to think or read as you get there.
The work that you do for yourself or an employer improves our future,
benefits your community and means something to you and those with whom you interact. You actually look forward to Monday.
The longer that you work, the more you learn and the more valuable you become to your employer with an increasing level of
responsibility, knowledge and pay.
Your work schedule leaves you sufficient time to enjoy your friends,
family and outside interests. Your needs are easily met so money does not control your life.
Your possessions are few, yet of high quality, thus allowing your home to be modest and comfortable,
easy to maintain and less expensive to own or rent.
You are connected to your surroundings, rather than just dwelling in them. Your backyard, for example, provides much of the produce you might need, plus a surplus that you can trade with neighbors. You have a stake in your community and participate in local decision making at the Town Council, P.T.A. and in other grass roots organizations. You buy what you truly need in nearby establishments whose owners are known to you and live in your community. If you have children, they can walk to a nearby well-funded neighborhood school in safety and then learn useful academic and authentic social skills which allows them to interact with a community of honorably employed adults when away from school.
Perhaps you need to occasionally travel to a large store
on the edge of town. You do this on a free or inexpensive shuttle bus or perhaps in
a simple, older vehicle, the use and costs of which you could share
with others, or a car that you rent only when you need it, thus
preserving for yourself the weeks or months it takes to earn the
thousands of pre-tax Dollars that owning a new car would require you to work
each year. Your interests, the things that you really like
to do with your mind and your hands, all the possibilities of your
life, are there to be explored because you have time, energy and
money to do so. (Editor's note: that was first written in 1995
when this page was first posted.
You know what's happened to the economy and our country since then.
Continue the erosion of our civic and economic life for another five years and
where do you think the country will be?)
"But this is America, all this is possible."
Not anymore it's not.
There are growing economic and social forces making this way of life even more difficult to
attain or maintain for the formerly comfortable and well off, and nearly impossible for younger people.
If you are among the lucky few who still has this kind of life outlined above,
these same forces threaten you. Whether you live in an isolated small town
or prefer
your anonymity as well as the multiplicity of things available to you
in a big city, these same threats are eroding your
security and ability to make choices for yourself.
Do you think what's outlined at the beginning of this page can only
occur in some mythic long-past small town? Before the hegemony of
consumerism and bottom-line oriented Wall Street economics, you
could do most of these
things anywhere, including in our cities. There is no reason that we
cannot begin to live like this again if sufficient people work to identify, repudiate and
then disempower those that promote and profit from limiting our social and economic horizons.
Their power is manifested in our lives as
consumerism. People voluntarily hand over their sovereignty as Americans
and citizens in exchange for
things, conveniences, and most importantly, ideas that sap and paralyze our
ability to fight the forces that are weakening our real economy and our ability to affect positive changes in it.
You as a citizen are now treated as a walking wallet,
health insurance code and an economic blood donor, obliged to pay for everything, including experiences.
A decade later came the commodification of labor and the discarding of
loyalties to our fellow citizens and taxpayers by politicians, the decline of
service work with professionals next to be downsized, offshored and eliminated.
We suffer the ongoing disenfranchisement of people from our own
community, to be replaced by commercial transactions with distant
strangers or those cheap labor surrogates allowed to flood into the country, imported
to undercut livable wage, benefit and job security demands.
Where will it end? When America looks like some faded
Third World fragment of the old British Empire? An overpopulated
wasteland of pollution, eroded landscapes, worn out infrastructure,
bare shelves and hungry people living in tents on downtown streets?
(written in 1995-little did we know).
With real unemployment above 20% and what's left of manufacturing being outsourced
at new levels, this vision has become reality.
The Middle Class is dying, if not dead. Next to be looted, the merely wealthy,
as the System that has
parasitized the world turns inward to feed off our own expendable people for the benefit
of the globalist elite. Pax Americana has been replaced with Plantation America.
It is a toolbox to identify some of these forces
and showcase opportunities to lessen or eliminate their control over
your life through everyday commercial activities and your choices that in the
aggregate, fight the big battles. We're not suggesting that you
pick up guns and start blasting away. What we advocate does far more
damage than bullets to these forces, and the people behind them. In addition to the actions that you can do, there are concepts that need to be
discussed and not just in a trite way. "Live sustainably" is
pregnant with meaning, and reflects
worthwhile goals, but those words hardly contain solutions to the
real integral problems of the world. Like many words and phrases
they become meaningless symbols unto themselves and substitute
for thought and action.
For example, why
doesn't America have decent mass transit as does Europe? We provide links
further along in the site to allow you to see what we
once had, what happened to it and what can be done to
bring it back. (Image: after General Motors bought up many
of America's streetcar lines and replaced them with diesel
busses the streetcars were burned so that they could never
return to the street to compete with less efficient
busses. Now even the buses are being defunded as people
abandon transit to drive their own cars in the induced panic of social distancing.)
The process began innocently enough. In the 1950s a growing number
of pleasant conveniences like washing machines became available, then a car for the family,
with the gradual and inevitable erosion of mass transit, a car for both parents, then the
ubiquitousness of technology and chemical products unimaginable a few decades earlier.
With this came a growing availability of consumer credit and
debt to make these items instantly available, the novelty then later over-dependence on
labor-saving devices, total dependence
on the car and absolute necessity of full time work, the two income
household to pay for more and more, then the importation of cheaper
and ever cheaper goods and the disappearance of high paying manufacturing jobs.
We shouldn't allow this to continue. To stop this takes work, time and
attention to details and a willingness to try new things for our own
and our children's benefit. Things might have been starting to turn
around in our favor with the internet and the breaking away from
media control and concentration. Then came the pandemic and the Orwellian private
then government urged censorship of social media. There are
serious changes ahead. We can
control some of these changes for our benefit or we can just react to them
after they have happened.
There is a lot of money being made and a lot of power being
gathered by the people that promote consumerism and the gullibility of the
public to accept idea changes based on various "emergencies." You pay for this
in gradually limited economic and social mobility, pollution, threats to your
health and a declining standard of living, as measured by things that really matter.
Plans have already been launched for Chinese style Social Credit Scores and digital I.D.s
in America and the West to “control Covid” and “prevent illegal immigration.”
We cannot rely on politicians because if they have any
true power they have been bought and paid for and if they haven't
been bought and paid for they probably don't have any real power.
(with a few notable local exceptions). We are on our collective own.
That's what this site is about.
How consumerism affects society, the economy and the Environment.
Environmental costs of consumerism
How consumerism
affects society,
the economy and the Environment.
"THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSUMERISM
Consumerism is manifested in the chronic purchasing of new goods and
services, with little attention to their true need within people's lives, durability,
product origin or the environmental consequences of manufacture and
disposal. Consumerism is driven by huge sums spent on advertising
designed to create both a desire to follow trends, and the resultant
personal self-reward system based on acquisition. Materialism is one
of the end results of consumerism. Like magic, one can push a button
and inexpensive things appear on your doorstep. For the time being
at least--until all the local small and large stores disappear, the free
shipping and low prices will evaporate, with different price points
depending on the average income of your zip code.
Consumerism interferes with the workings of society by replacing the normal common-sense desire for an adequate supply of life's necessities, community life, a stable family and healthy relationships with an artificial ongoing and insatiable quest for things and the money to buy them with little regard for the true utility of what is bought. An intended consequence of this, promoted by those who profit from consumerism, is to accelerate the discarding of the old, because of lack of durability, in material goods or a change in fashion. This is recently applied to ideas and traditions as well.
Landfills
swell with cheap discarded products that fail early and
cannot be repaired. Products are made psychologically
obsolete long before they actually wear out. A generation is
growing up without having ever known what quality goods are.
Friendship, family ties and personal autonomy are only
promoted as a vehicle for gift giving and the rationale for
the selection of communication services and personal
acquisition. Everything becomes mediated through the
spending of money on goods and services. Human beings who
cannot spend become worthless, except as excuses for billable hours charged by
parasitical medical services that have been taken over through private equity.
Many consumers run out of room in their homes to store the things that they buy. The self-storage industry paves over thousands of acres of good farm land every year to build these cities of orphaned and unwanted things so as to give people more room to house the new things that they are persuaded to buy. If these stored products were so essential in the first place, why do they need to be warehoused? An overabundance of things lessens the value of what people possess.
"You work in a job you hate, to buy stuff that you don't need, to impress people that you don't like."
- Fight Club
People move frequently as though neighborhoods
and cities were products to be tried out like brands of deodorant. For a
while, malls replaced neighborhood main street shopping areas, parks, churches and community
gatherings for many who
no longer even bothered to meet their neighbors or cared to
know their names. Now malls are dying in favor of the magic button that
makes items appear on one's doorstep. A third of small businesses have
been destroyed by useless and ineffectual government mandated shutdowns in California.
When the last stores close and magic buy button on your computer is the only alternative, prices will skyrocket.
"TOTAL COSMETIC SURGICAL PROCEDURES in 2020 2,314,720."
The National Clearing House of Plastic Surgery
Statistics.
The
mindset of humans as consumer objects triumphs when women,
failing to meet the standards dictated by the availability
of the above "services," are traded in for a "newer model."
This same way of thinking allows parents to justify entering
their little girls in beauty contests as though they were
prize livestock. The same happens when honorable and decent
men are rejected by women as they are unable to facilitate funding
for an easy lifestyle of consumption. Women forsake family
for an income to buy things and experiences. Here's
the affect that unobtainable good looks have on the happiness of the
average person:
BEAUTY makes the world an unhappier place, say two mathematicians
who have calculated the ideal way to match lonely hearts to their soulmates.
Conventionally good looking people such as Kate Moss, George Clooney,
Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lopez, may be pleasing to the eye, but their very
presence in our midst makes the world a less contented place, the research
suggests.
At fault is the so-called Vogue factor, a measure of how much influence
beauty has in society. The higher the Vogue factor, the mathematicians
said, the more dissatisfied and miserable we are with our sexual partners..."
"Even if the more beautiful players have a larger satisfaction by far, the
general dissatisfaction in the system increases." With television, cinema
and magazines such as Vogue bombarding us with images of beautiful women
and good looking men conforming to a standardised concept of beauty,
overall levels of dissatisfaction were likely to increase.
Working with Andrea Capocci of Fribourg University in Switzerland,
Dr Caldarelli updated the stable marriage problem, a mathematical puzzle
first examined in 1962 by two University of California researchers.
David Gale and Lloyd Shapley's 1962 study found that provided the criteria
for choosing partners - wit, beauty, intelligence, wealth or whatever - had
no intrinsic value in society, then everybody should end up with a partner
with whom they were reasonably happy.
New Scientist reports today. "The result of this makes distressing reading
for the plain and ordinary. With beauty on the scene, you're now much less
likely to be matched with your number one choice, unless you happen to be
one of the beautiful people yourself."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk
10-26-00 (Now paywalled)
And
the following from the Wall Street Journal "Each year an estimated 1.5 million
Americans choose to have nose jobs, tummy tucks or breast
enlargements. Many of these people would be unable to afford
these vital surgical procedures if it were not for the
public spirited efforts of loan companies like Jayhawk
Acceptance Corporation, a used car lender that has turned to
covering the booming demand for elective surgery. Lenders in
this field face an unusual challenge," explains the Wall
Street Journal: "A lender can take a used car but can hardly
repossess a face lift." Consequently lenders like Jayhawk
have to charge a slightly higher interest rate, up to 22.5%
to be exact. Says Michael Smartt, Jayhawk CEO, "We're
capitalizing on America's vanity." If you don't measure up to the
standards of beauty like the sucky creature above- "they" say that society thinks that you're
ugly!
Witness the simplistic
materialist psychosis of the bumper sticker: "He
who dies with the most toys wins" Is
psychosis too strong a word to use here? Appreciate the following
line of reasoning:
"I can imagine it, therefore I want it.
I want it, therefore I should have it. Because I should have it, I need it.
Because I need it, I deserve it. Because I deserve it, I will do anything necessary to get
it."
This is
one of the techniquess that allow people to surrender to consumerism. As
a society we have gone from self-sufficiency based on our internal
sense of reasonable limits, to the ridiculous goal of Keeping
up with the Jones, then on to stampeding for the Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous, or at least as far as our credit limit or home equity
line allows us to go.
Happiness
can't be purchased in the marketplace, no matter how much advertising
tries to convince you of it. Market driven forces have ursurped the
role once assumed by family, home, common-sense and community. We
have been programmed to believe that we should pursue more money to
spend on more things offered in the marketplace, to be living
mannequins for the material adornments of the hour, our worth
determined by what we are, what we have, or don't have, rather than who we
are,
what we do or what we know.
Consumerism,
already having captured death as a consumer obligation whereby
sadness and regret are quenched by spending lots of money, now turns
major life events like weddings and births into
consumer events with their own hierarchy of demands for the
things which assume a life of their own. For example, the bride's
dress and accessories assumes far more significance in the telling
than the bride's state of mind. Baby shower trinkets take precedence
over helping with the baby.
Recreation has become commercialized as special clothing is seemingly required
for any physical leisure activity. Ever wonder why a man cannot go running,
or even to the supermarket, without wearing an expensive Nike ball cap,
or a Hurley t-shirt? An extreme example of this is when usually poor adults,
who could often better use the money for education,
nutrition and improved housing, demonstrate their self-worth and strength of character
by turning themselves into walking billboards wearing Chinese made plastic licensed!
clothing advertising some billionaire's sports franchise.
Worse, their sons often foresake educational opportunities to play
midnight basketball instead of burning the
midnight oil studying, pinning all hopes on an athletic "career,"
i.e. lots of money for endorsing consumer items after throwing
balls back and forth for a few years.
Professional
sports are synthesized and packaged
reality designed to enrich people already fabulously rich, subject the observer
to another layer of advertising, and to maintain the intellectual
impoverishment of those watching. Local sports teams and activities like Little League and
Youth Soccer are healthy and wonderful. There is however, already a tendency of their
ongoing commercialization of even these if people allow it.
Pro-sports contribute
next-to-nothing to communities economically yet they are
sucking hundreds of millions of tax dollars that could be better spent on parks,
schools and public services into architectural boondoggles and billionaire team owner's
pockets. Local sports teams and activities like Little League and Youth Soccer are
healthy and wonderful. There is however, a tendency of the ongoing
commercialization of even these if people allow it.
"Sports
is another crucial example of the indoctrination system . . . It
offers people something to pay attention to that is of no importance
. . . It keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their
lives that they might have an idea of something about . . . People
have the most exotic information and understanding about all sorts of
arcane issues . . . It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of
submission to authority, and group cohesion behind leadership
elements, in fact its training in irrational jingoism . . . That's
why energy is devoted to supporting them . . . and advertisers are
willing to pay for them." Noam Chomsky
Manufacturing Consent The
constant cycle of ever less productive and rewarding work and consumption
is destructive enough of
values, but when extra hours must be worked to maintain the same
level of consumption, or when insufficient work, or no work at all is
available, and a family still goes into debt to accumulate more things, or
feels worthless because of a lack of the "right" possessions,
consumerism is slow societal suicide and civic decay.. Time,
the precious shrinking commodity of our lives, is exchanged for money
to buy things that there usually is little time to enjoy. What time
is left after work is often devoured by television, basically a
series of ever-more mediocre filler programs inserted between
ever-more-spectacular commercials whose purpose is to stoke further
desire for more things.
The online alternative for more highly evolved people who sneer at
the yokels that still watch TV is essentially a series of
digital ad fields with courtesy "news" and political indoctrination content
inserted to justifythe viewer's attention and willingness to surrender
their identity and data to the advertising ringmasters.
Others abandon the pretext filler of TV or newssites for pure online shopping which is 100%
advertising.
Soon, windshield display advertisements and voice command "buy"
orders may be possible in one's car if the tech companies can just get
around the safety concerns.
When these insatiable material desires fail to be satisfied, people
grow unhappy with their lives and in extreme cases riot and loot
to get that they have been programmed to want.
People
become so used to the intrusion of advertising into their
consciousness that they fail to protect themself, or worse, their children from being
seduced by it. Convinced that their self worth is based on $500
athletic shoes or designer clothing, children are already on the road
to spiritual dissatisfaction and resentment as well as a perception
of diminished self-worth. When they become adolescents they are
probably not going to be happy or productive even were they provided
with an endless supply of things that few parents could afford.
Refuse to allow advertising into your environment whenever and
however possible:
On TV, Give your TV away to the Salvation Army, there's no hope for television, except to use it as a computer monitor.
Online:
First of all, why are you shoveling
money into the pocket of Bill Gates by using Internet Explorer,
or any of its derivative products like Microsoft Edge? Get Firefox and use it as your
browser. It's Free, and you can easily protect yourself from popups, cookies, data mining
and other parasitical commercial trash. A. Download and install Firefox
B. Go to "Firefox Tools"
C. Select "Add ons and themes"
D. Select AdBlocker Ultimate
E. Allow it to access what you download
Zero ads, including on Youtube should be the result
"Quality
Time" has become a commodity unto itself. Unfortunately, there is no
marketplace for quality time, you have to preserve it for yourself.
Why not use the time in your life, work less for the money to pay the taxes
and go straight for the happiness that usually comes from the
non-material? This process is part of overcoming
consumerism.
It is an often stated catechism that the economy would improve if people
just borrowed more, bought more cars, more things, and spent more money.
Another part of this attempted juggling act of
trade balances is to justify the further strip-mining of our own
natural heritage in order to gain further export earnings, i.e.
Redwood logs from our ancient cathedral forests are sent to Mexico to
be milled on machinery that once was tended by well paid Americans in
the U.S. or Alaskan oil drilled in wildlife refuges is sent to Japan.
The boots and uniforms worn by US soldiers in the sickening waste of
of the Middle East are made in China.
"Free
trade" laws are promoted so that American corporations can export
pollution finally regulated here and import tariff-free goods back
into the US from their foreign subsidiaries in whatever Sweatshop
Republic they can find the cheapest workers. NAFTA is a codified
example of this policy carried out at a national level.
More recent attempts at promoting other free trade agreements have been
thwarted by citizen activism.
http://www.albionmonitor.com/11-14-95/naftacon.html
Service jobs are now also vulnerable to export. Some companies are now
using low wage workers in Ireland or India to staff their technical-support,
and order-taking phone lines or do insurance underwriting. There is no technical
reason why any person answering a telephone or sitting at a keyboard, to and
including the pandemic, work from home, professional class, has to be physically
located in the U.S. You call a softwear or warranty line and talk to someone
making $1.10 a day in India or China. Nor are professionals, like radiologists,
or surgeons using robotic tools, immune from this. The same blind, unquestioning
acceptance of consumerism will allow the export of even these services and
professional managerial jobs who sat in from an office tower downtown the block
earning $100,000 dollars six figures but who can easily be replaced by an eager
young Asian making $2,000 a year, with no commensurate price reduction at your end,
unless the companies that attempt this are not challenged by consumers customers.
If we are not good enough to make it, service it, or represent the product,
then we're not good enough to buy it.
#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December.
#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores.
#4 Victoria's Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores.
#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years.
#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores.
#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online.
#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to 'millions of dollars in severance pay'.
#9 The Baltic Dry Shipping Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.
#10 This is the worst slump for core U.S. factory orders in three years.
#11 We just witnessed the largest decline in the Philly Fed Business Index in more than 7 years.
#12 In January, sales of existing homes fell 8.9 percent from a year earlier. That was the third
month in a row that we have seen a decline of at least 8 percent. This is an absolutely
catastrophic trend for the real estate industry. After the pandemic surge of price gouging,
sales of homes and condos are now cratering agin.
#13 U.S. housing starts were down 11.2 percent in December compared to the previous month.
#14 Compared to a year earlier, home sales in southern California were down 17 percent in January.
native advertising
#15 In December, home sales in Sacramento County fell a whopping 22.5 percent c
ompared to a year earlier.
#16 Pending home sales in the United States have now fallen on a year over year
basis for 13 months in a row.
#17 More than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is now “seriously delinquent.”
That is an all-time record.
#18 More than 7 million Americans are behind on their auto loan payments.
That is also a new all-time record, and it is far higher than anything that we witnessed during the last recession.
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2019/03/03/the-us-economy-is-falling-apart-18-big-signs/
Environmental Money is not the only way to
measure the cost of an item. When one adds up all the raw
materials and energy that go into the goods and services
consumed over an individual's lifetime, the toll on the
environment is staggering. When this cost is multiplied
out over the lifespan of families, cities and countries,
the proportions are incredible.
An
example: 583 billion plastic bottles were produced in 2021.
That is 100 billion more than were produced just five years ago.
While
many new appliances and cars are more productive
and energy efficient, discarding the old often leads to an almost
total waste of the energy and material already invested in these
products. This alone may more than nullify the energy savings of the new.
For example, people attempt to sell Ikea compressed sawdust "furniture"
and when someone attempts to remove the one way screws holding it
together for transport, it crumbles into useless landfill stuffing.
"The
most important assets are brands.
"When
people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose
their personality and become instruments of other people's
wills."
Robert
Graves Can
brands survive ecosystem collapse or the fall of our
government?
You
usually see people thus affected in public places, lurking around a car or a boat.
They bask in its
radiance, act respectful and imply knowledge about its quality and
providence. They act as they feel that they should act, making sure
that others see them acting this way in the presence of the thing.
They can only communicate with each other through the medium of the
object, the cold piece of metal, in the presence of which they feel
that they can speak to each other and actually show some emotion and
interact.
The
thing, the product, becomes a longed for goal, a means of justifying
their existence, a way of envisioning themself in a different world
with possession of the thing being the key tenet. Particular speech
patterns often develop around things to the exclusion of the personal
qualities of the speaker, as in
"I
used to have a....."/"Yeah, friend of mine, he's got a "57.....",
"last night I drank two....and a six pack of....","she was
wearing..."," we did two....then a ....have you seen the
new...""...how about those Forty-Niners?..." "Look what I
got...""what do you think about (Name of fashion thought leader)."
Empty,
hollow words, bespeaking a personal void filled by the pursuit of
things. Getting away from need for things is at least a start in
allowing people to communicate and then once communicating, beginning
to solve real problems in their home, community, nation and the
world.
*********************************
Are there any personalities that are responsable
for the negative influence of consumerism? All of us of course. How
can any one individual be at fault in this? There IS one man who
bears inordinate responsability for this, as a sidebar to this page
we would like to introduce you to a little known man who took the
techiques of his uncle, Sigmund Freud and turned them
into tools to sell to, demoralize and impoverish some people while
enriching certain others: here is his story: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/ Bernays
invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and
was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the
masses. He showed American corporations how they could make
people want things they didn't need by systematically
linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern
techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in
the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR
stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup
was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them
that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and
freedom... There
are a growing number of people who are aware that these aspects of
consumerism are some of the main obstacles to living in a pleasant
safe community, seeing their children well-educated and living long
healthy productive lives, without squander and waste. The following
pages offer many different tools to help facilitate
this: Next
Link
What DOES
overcoming
consumerism accomplish?
************** *********** ****** *** *
Psychologically Consumerism
sets each person against themself in an endless quest for
the attainment of material things and experiences yet to be
purchased. Weight training, diet centers, breast
reduction, breast enhancement, cosmetic ,
permanent eye make-up, liposuction, and collagen injections,
are examples of people turning
themselves into human consumer goods more suited for
the "marketplace" than living in a healthy balanced
society.
Looks like we convinced at least one plastic surgeon to allegedly question their values.
Nice rip off of our material to attempt to sell financials services to doctors.
Imitation is flattery, so thank you.
https://prudentplasticsurgeon.com/overcoming-consumerism/
It is impossible to win a war against yourself or your
uncontrolled desires.
This is the artificial internal drive that the advertisers tap into.
You "imagine it" because they bombard your consciousness with its
image until you then move to step two, "I want it..."etc.
Refuse to allow advertising into your environment whenever possible.
Treat advertising like someone attempting to spit in your face.
Where once parents and grandparents shared the home with their adult
children, acting
as baby-sitters and providers of wisdom and tradition, we now have
corporate owned day care and rest homes. This preservation of nuclear
family ties is one reason that some immigrant groups are still able
to excel economically until the second generation (usually) becomes
affected by consumerism, abandons its parents' values and then often
goes overboard using material objects as a means of
self-identification with American society.
ECONOMIC COSTS OF CONSUMERISM
Since March 2020, the government has borrowed, in your name, and blasted out into the economy
$5,000,000,000,000 ($5 Trillions) in deficit spending, and the Federal Reserve has created an additional
$4,500,000,000,000 ($4.5 Trillions) to buy and maintain the value of shaky financial instruments,
pay off yesterday's private debts, to promote temporary low interest rates and jack up new consumer debt and binge buying.
That 9.5 Trillion, thanks to government shutdowns, competes with whatever money you may have to buy fewer goods,
and ruins the value of wages that small business can afford, relative to the deliberately created inflation.
That along with the elite's "wartime" sanctions on American's previously inexpensive energy and food imports,
has ruined what's left of our standard of living.
How have we benefited from that additional $9.5 Trillion dollars and those sanctions?
All that is added to the national debt, which supposedly is the reason the "experts"
claim we cannot have healthcare for all Americans (Medicare For All), pay for free college,
free drug treatment for addicts or vocational training, nutrition,
nor can we rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, nor house working people who can not afford dwellings.
The
more consumerism spreads, the weaker is the incentive to manufacture
long-lasting, quality products, and the greater the likelihood that
cheaply made junk will instead be imported from the lowest-wage,
environmentally unregulated overseas manufacturer that mobile
capital, ever seeking the highest return, can find.
So how' IS the Globalist's Economy working out for you, your family and your community now?
The
flood of spending on imports creates a need for compensating export
earnings. This quest for export earnings turns the U.S. into a
traitor to principles that this nation supposedly fought for in
the WWI, and WWII, and generates an eagerness to embrace potential
export markets, no matter what the human rights or environmental
records of these countries may be, or how much damage this does to
American workers.
Here's examples of how it went down in Bill Clinton's presidency.
"Both GE workers and the community of Fort Wayne got swindled. In
1988, the employees had agreed to a $1.20 per hour wage cut to
prevent their jobs from being moved to Mexico. Then in 1992, GE
managed to squeeze a $485,290 tax cut out of the local government,
claiming it was necessary to defray the cost of new machinery needed
to preserve jobs. Once NAFTA passed, the wage cuts and the tax breaks
were not enough to keep those jobs or the machinery in Fort Wayne,
they went to
Mexico. No refunds of tax subsidies. As one longtime GE employee put it, "You give them
all your life, and this is what they give you."
Looking at the joblessness and poverty sweeping Indiana now it's no
wonder that people were upset. Wonder if the long term G.E. Employee
quoted above, and his family and all their friends will actively
boycott G.E. products and more importantly, their financial services
for the rest of their lives? We hope so. According to the highly respected
and non-commercial Consumer Reports Magazine, Maytag products made
in Mexico are not that good. (based on hundreds of thousands of subscriber
surveys detailing the strengths and weaknesses of consumer goods.
Better option; Speed Queen is a U.S. made brand that is indestructible,
commercial quality and will last for generations.)
The actual manufacture of products becomes almost a nuisance for
conglomerates anxious to grow their capital through private equity
which uses investor or borrowed money, the debt often dumped on the
company they bought, to and maximize profits through buying and closing
factories, firing workers, selling the real estate, raiding workers’ pension plans,
and using the paper losses to offset profits made elsewhere. That is what happened
to Sears. That's what slaves in foreign countries are for. BUT,
how will Americans buy their foreign slave made products
if they no longer have jobs and if they do have jobs, why shouldn't we go
out of our way to list and boycott these companies that have betrayed
American workers?
#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.
COSTS
OF CONSUMERISM
Consumerism causes the
wasteful use of energy and material far above and beyond
that needed for everyday living at a comfortable
level.
Getting
AWAY
FROM CONSUMERISM
Having fewer things means more enjoyment of what you have and actually
getting to use it, thereby raising its intrinsic value. The less
clutter that one has in their surroundings, the fewer distractions
there are from the essentials such as family, friends, food, nature
and study. With less clutter, one needs a smaller space in which to
live comfortably and thus needs to work less to earn pretax money to pay rent to store
things. If you haven't used something in the last year, how much
likelihood is there that you ever will use
it?
Buildings age and become dilapidated.
Machines wear out.
Cars rust.
People die.
But what lives on are the brands."
Hector
Liang
Chairman, United Biscuits
"Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in
the mind."
-Walter
Landor
Industrial Designer
Making do with less allows one to distance themself from the tendency
of the victims of advertising to self-define according to the
material objects possessed or not possessed, driven, drunk, worn,
used, seen with or abused.
See the Educational
Resources...
section for a large series of effective reform organizations and
resouces.
2
Families compared
our
personal consumer choices
consumption
chart
resources
to overcome consumerism
radical
anti-consumerism
cars
How to raise food
How
to raise trees
eliminate
polystyrene foam products
Corporate
officers and their interlocking
interests
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