How Consumerism Affects Society, Our Economy and the Environment

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consumerism affect society.

How Consumerism Hurts Society, 
Our Economy and the Environment.

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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.

"But this is America, all this is possible."
Not anymore it's not.

(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?)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

How the rest of this page is laid out:

How consumerism affects society, the economy and the Environment.

Economic costs of consumerism

Environmental costs of consumerism

Getting away from 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.

In addition, the purchasers are robbed by the high price of new things, caused by the inflation that dumping 9.5 Trillion dollars into the economy created, the cost of the credit to buy them, and the less obvious expenses such as, in the case of automobiles, increased registration, insurance, repair and maintenance costs.

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.
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.

"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:

Why beautiful people create an ugly mood by Robert Uhlig

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."

Consumerism's standard for  the new women.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

Sports still No Ticket Out Of The Ghetto

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.

Attendance at expensive sporting events rife with advertising and corporate sponsorship are the manifestation of mass consumerism. Oakland, California, a community with high levels of unemployment, gang violence and poverty had banks that created special loan categories so that people could get personal lines of credit to buy season tickets to the taxpayer-financed stadium. The team has now left for Las Vegas, but the debts still have to be repaid.

"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.

A great example of the triumph of brand, and sociological advertising is crowds looting the Nike Store.

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 possible. Treat advertising like someone attempting to spit in your face.

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.

Download it here.

Free adblockers on the Firefox browser really do work:

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
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.

"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.

ECONOMIC COSTS OF 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.
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.

The nationwide loss of manufacturing jobs leads to a corresponding growth in unemployment and the number of welfare recipients, less personal wealth, a shrinking tax base, fewer public services, and greater public and private debt, hopelessness for job seekers and a growing negative balance of trade. Americans can't afford to buy the house next door, but foreigners can. They have lots of dollars to spend here because of the money that we're sending to their country to buy their low quality junk which is sold usually sold at American-made prices.

What about the argument that "We are in a global marketplace and exports (and therefore imports) create jobs?"

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.

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.

Great history of NAFTA and the corporate parasites that pushed it. This is what happened to productive American jobs and perhaps is the basis for the current poverty of the homeless man down the block who was once honorably employed, or the destruction of once stable families that have broken up into drug addiction, prison and alienation from each other.

http://www.albionmonitor.com/11-14-95/naftacon.html
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?

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.

 
18 big signs the US economy falling apart: This is from 2019, before the Pandemic which conveniently papered over this with $9.5 Trillion, created by government borrowing temporarily reversed, the numbers, but now are now worse than ever. A few of you got PPP loan crumbs, the Wall Street insiders got banquets of billions handed to them so they could buy productive assets like companies, drug patents, apartments, hospitals and houses that they can suck more money out of you with rents or inflated prices.

#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.

#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
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.

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.

https://www.earthday.org/fact-sheet-how-much-disposable-plastic-we-use/

"Disposable" items exemplify this. "Fun" is a catchword discarding notions of inherent value, longevity, and the environmental consequences of manufacture and disposal of the product. Buying quality products that are warranted against failure or wearing out, learning about the materials that things are made of, their national origin and the conditions of the workers that make them, are some ways of resisting consumerism and waste.

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.

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?

"The most important assets are brands.
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."

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Walter Landor
Industrial Designer

"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?


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.

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.

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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?

See the
Educational Resources... section for a large series of effective reform organizations and resouces.



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Overcoming Consumerism Index      |  Consumerism's bad effects  |

O. C. Accomplishes?     Active Resistance      Hands on methods

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

e-mail :  

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