However, our financial elite do not want us to do any of this! Instead, with continued global warming (produced by our hyperconsumption and hyperproduction, and the long workweeks it requires), from which the very rich get steadily richer, we're going to continue to melt the polar ice caps, eventually flooding all the low-lying coastal areas of the world, eliminating coral reefs in the process, creating ever more desert wasteland and ever more virulent hurricanes and tornados too.
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“Americans generated 25 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2005 — a 60 percent increase since 1980 — and more than half of that mass went into 1,654 landfills. That is like a fleet of 1,800 Queen Mary cruise ships being buried every year.” And most all of these landfills allow greenhouse gas (primarily methane and carbon dioxide) to escape into the atmosphere -- hundreds of tons of it every year, into the air, as decomposition of all this waste continues, year after year, ever more each year, on into 2008 and beyond.
Don’t forget, it’s through the production of all this stuff that we keep most of our workforce employed! Consider the large share of our workforce that markets, distributes, sells, insures, steals, and/or eventually disposes of all this stuff, plus all the people who work on the lawsuits and court cases that result, in the course of all this ‘commerce’ and lawbreaking. (From polluted air alone, more than 100,000 people die prematurely in just the Los Angeles basin each year, while 35,000 die nationally each year in industrial accidents, with hundreds of thousands more injured. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7162(191107)38%3A1%3C76%3ABOIA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E)
And for those superrich consumers at the very top of the food chain, here’s how we keep hundreds of thousands of workers employed – workers who could be rebuilding our infrastructure instead, who could be helping to provide health care and better education for all:
- Fabulous cars (like the $250,000 Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione),
- Humongous boats (like the 459-foot, six-deck yacht that starts at $250 million),
- Dazzling jewelry (a 300-carat diamond necklace for $16 million).
- The 18.5-foot-long, exact scale (1:48) model of the Titanic weighs 1,500 pounds “and features teak decking and signage that is accurate and, in some cases, legible only when viewed through a magnifying glass.” It took seven people working full time for seven years — “three years longer than it took to complete the 882-foot ship.” Price: $2.5 million.
- Beds costing $1.6 million each that use repelling magnets to softly and flexibly suspend you and your mattress about 16 inches off the floor of your bedroom. It feels and acts like a water bed, but without the water. You are kept aloft by large repelling magnets, one layer on the floor and another covering the bottom of your mattress, guided by side boards that prevent the elite owner from floating away to one side or another.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/business/22offline.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Summary and conclusion:
American workers are slowly becoming enslaved to the superrich, the rich, & even to our own consumer addictions. The more we work, the more we feel compelled to buy. The more we buy, the more we're compelled to work. As J.K. Galbraith said, we are each like a rat in an activity wheel that must run ever faster to keep from tumbling.
Meanwhile our environment suffers the ever worsening consequences.
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For more on some aspects of this essay, see Bill Moyers’ interview with political theorist and author Benjamin Barber: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12212007/watch.html. The title of Barber’s latest book is: Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. Barber explains how the global economy produces too many goods we don't need, too few of those we do need, and, to keep the racket going, targets children as consumers, in a market where shopping is a twenty-four hour business. Capitalism, Barber says, "seems quite literally to be consuming itself, leaving democracy in peril and the fate of citizens uncertain." Take a look at the inside of Barber’s book, here: http://www.amazon.com/Consumed-Markets-Children-Infantilize-Citizens/dp/0393049612
Or read the text of this interview here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/12212007/transcript1.html
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