AlterNet: The Holiday's Shopping Season Can't Stop the Coming 'Severe Recession'

[marmar]

The Holiday's Shopping Season Can't Stop the Coming 'Severe Recession'

By Danny Schechter, AlterNet. Posted November 24, 2007.

The media is complicit in "shop-apocalypse," as consumers go wild in a shaky economy.



Boston, Mass. -- You could almost run that old Lone Ranger theme -- the famous William Tell Overture -- as the soundtrack to the local news stories I watched here in Boston on Thanksgiving day featuring perky local news "correspondents" stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers racing into malls for "midnight madness" sales.

It was, in the words of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a "shop-apocalypse." His crusade against out-of-control consumption is pictured in the new film "What Would Jesus Buy?" opening at some theaters in L.A. and San Francisco.

This highly relevant film was not on TV, of course, because our media is deeply complicit in promoting and encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials and newscasts. This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV's promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get, with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising-sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall-to-wall Macys ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you the stores. Marketing is what the media does best.

The only negative note was the fear among some that toys might be unsafe because of lead or other dangers. Some 26 million toys have been recalled this year, a sign that the regulators were asleep on this front in the economic wars as they were on Wall Street. The real danger may not be lead in the toys but another type of lead in our heads that leads to denial on the part of millions that we can go on with addictive, well-cultivated, crazed consumption habits.

Bill Bowles writes about this on his CNI blog:

"The problem is that many of us have been force-fed with a diet of nothing but passive, uncritical consumptionism; indeed, we are addicted to the stuff; breaking such powerful habits is what this is all about; it's about getting people to think critically again about what's going on and why and what, if anything, we can do about it." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/68728/

[Skittles]

1. I detest this time of year

watching people, even DUers, agonizing over what crap presents to buy for people WHO DON'T NEED PRESENTS or what "BARGAINS" are to be had (when they wouldn't even buy said object if the marketing didn't so easily entrap them) - DAMN, I wish people could just cut thir f***ing consuming addictions