Consumerism

A New Hedonism: A Post-Consumerism Vision

December 8, 2017 Kate Soper, thenextsystem.org Create! Climate Change, Consumerism

By Kate Soper for The Next System Project - But the shopping-mall culture is also in many ways bad even for those who live in affluent societies. What the economist, John Maynard Keynes, condemned as the pathology of monetary greed is now not only regarded as a normal response to our times but also an essential driver of national well-being. Its effect is to subordinate everyone to a time economy and work ethic that sees free time as a threat to human prosperity rather than a form in which it can be realized. Despite the huge gains in productivity, time scarcity, stress at work, and insecurity remain the dominant life experience of huge numbers of people. An existence devoted to the creation of ever more stuff, most of it unneeded other than to enhance corporate profits or to secure the reproduction of the consumerist economic infrastructure, leaves all too little time and energy for actually having a life. Indeed, it functions as a major constraint on the self-development and political awareness required to enjoy a fuller and freer life. Everything that should be central to human pleasure and well-being has become marginal, whether it be convivial time with family or friends, engagement in civic and political projects, the enjoyment of hobbies and educational activities, making music, reading, gardening, being in nature, or just idling.

Black Friday Mall Protest in Missouri Results in Arrests

November 25, 2017 Rachel Katz, www.abcnews.go.com Resist! Black Friday, Consumerism, Thanksgiving

By Rachel Katz for ABC News. Seven people, including a state lawmaker, were arrested today at a Missouri mall after nearly 100 protesters disrupted Black Friday shopping, according to local media. Galleria Mall, located near St. Louis, was forced to close because of the protests, mall security told ABC News. Protesters entered the mall around 1:15 p.m. local time and help their fists up, chanting "No justice, no profit," an eyewitness told ABC News. They walked through the mall corridors and entered several stores, including a Dillard's. The protests lasted nearly two hours.

Eight Things Money Can’t Buy You This Black Friday

November 24, 2017 Staff, medium.com Create! Black Friday, Capitalism, Consumerism, Propaganda

By Staff of The Rules - While the US holiday of Thanksgiving indisputably stems from a celebration of the massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, the origins of ‘Black Friday’ are much less clear. What is agreed is that retailers sought to take advantage of the Thursday holiday and draw people into shops for what, in a consumerist culture, is considered a civic duty: shopping. After weeks of advertising beforehand, on the Friday following the food, family and football, hundreds of thousands of people are expected to descend on the shops, often risking life and limb for a bargain. In a globalised world, this once uniquely American phenomenon has now been exported. Today, from Russia to Ireland and Pakistan, we’re told that the answer to any problem is to buy stuff and what better day to do so than on Black Friday? You may agree that you can’t consume your way to happiness but it’s worth acknowledging that the lure of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (created to allow online retailers to get in on the action) is hard to resist. So to help you, here is a list of things money can’t buy. Read it every time you feel the impulse to “add to basket”. A sense of wonder: From trees to a smile, and even a gush of wind, so much around us can provide us with the feeling of the numinous; that we are in deep communion with life around us.

How Advertising Impacts Our Moral Core

March 2, 2017 Lee Camp, www.rt.com Resistance Report Consumerism, Corporatism, Media, Propaganda

By Lee Camp for Redacted Tonight. There is a specific type of global mind control other than the mainstream media that grips us daily without us realizing: Corporate advertisements. They have a powerful influence on our emotions and esteem to the point that we adopt whatever they peddle as our own beliefs. And a recent Starbucks commercial demonstrates how the corporate-coffee giant uses more than caffeine to control your brain. What was meant to be a touchy-feely campaign from Starbucks to unite American coffee consumers over good times and bad instead served as a sobering reminder of the ills of capitalism, corporate pollution of the Earth and economic inequality. They may manipulate you into believing they've got your back, but what corporations like Starbucks really got is your money--and your morals. Self-professed coffee drinker Lee Camp lays into the gods of the frappucino and more in the latest Redacted Tonight.

2016 Empty Shelves, Store Closings Across America

February 3, 2016 Michael Snyder, www.endoftheamericandream.com Educate! Capitalism, Consumerism, United States

By Michael Snyder for End Of The American Dream - Major retailers in the United States are shutting down hundreds of stores, and shoppers are reporting alarmingly bare shelves in many retail locations that are still open all over the country. It appears that the retail apocalypse that made so many headlines in 2015 has gone to an entirely new level as we enter 2016. As economic activity slows down and Internet retailers capture more of the market, brick and mortar retailers are cutting their losses. This is especially true in areas that are on the lower portion of the income scale.

Food Shopping As A Vote For Positive Change

June 2, 2015 Reynard Loki, www.alternet.org Create! Consumerism, Food and Agriculture

By Reynard Loki in Alternet - One of the easiest and most powerful ways we can make a difference is through our decisions as consumers. What we choose to buy not only says a lot about who we are and what kind of values we have, but also has many cumulative repercussions, from helping to shape corporate and public policy to affecting animal welfare, public health, social justice and the global environment. And one of the best ways to vote with our wallets is through our grocery shopping. According to a 2014 Gallup poll on consumer spending, Americans are opening up those wallets more for groceries than for other household essentials. Fifty-nine percent of Americans reporting increased spending on food shopping, ahead of spending on gasoline (58 percent), utilities (45 percent), healthcare (42 percent) and rent or mortgage (32 percent).

Monsanto’s Worst Fear May Be Coming True

May 22, 2015 Jonathan Latham, www.greenmedinfo.com Educate! Consumerism, Food and Agriculture, GMOs, Monsanto

The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people's idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation. A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle's decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse. Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others. A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious. The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue.

Mall Of America Security Catfished #BlackLivesMatter

March 19, 2015 Lee Fang, www.firstlook.org Educate! #BlackLivesMatter, Black Lives Matter (BLM), Consumerism, Racial Justice, Surveillance

Documents obtained by The Intercept indicate that security staff at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota used a fake Facebook account to monitor local Black Lives Matter organizers, befriend them, and obtain their personal information and photographs without their knowledge. Evidence of the fake Facebook account was found in a cache of files provided by the Mall of America to Bloomington officials after a large Black Lives Matter event at the mall on December 20 protesting police brutality. The files included briefs on individual organizers, with screenshots that suggest that much of the information was captured using a Facebook account for a person named “Nikki Larson.”

Rev. Bill Talen Becoming A Legend

February 6, 2015 Harrison Jacobs, www.businessinsider.com Resist! Consumerism, Faith, police brutality

At 64 years old, this is Reverend Billy's life. He, the Church, and his wife, director Savitri Durkee, protest everything from consumerism to fracking to race relations and spend their days disrupting the businesses of JPMorgan Chase, Disney, Starbucks, and the half-dozen other corporations he’s singled out as the destroyers of America and Planet Earth. He’s gained a following that is at once fervently spiritual and radically political. When there is a cause or an injustice that needs protesting, from New York to California, he’s there preaching, demonstrating, and, on more than 50 occasions, getting arrested. As impressive as he is, however, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this activist legend is that he isn’t real, or at least he didn’t used to be.

People Of Conscience: “Brown Friday” Don’t Shop

November 28, 2014 I Am Color Of Change, www.iam.colorofchange.org Resist! Capitalism, Consumerism, Human Rights, police brutality

BLACKOUT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS (Blackout) is a nationwide network of high profile artists, activists and faith leaders, who stand against human rights violations. We’ve watched in outrage, frustration and sadness as Michael Brown, Akai Gurley, Oscar Grant, Tanisha Anderson, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, John Crawford, and so many others met their deaths at the hands of police officers. We mourn the loss of life and the absence of justice for Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride and Jordan Davis, killed by private citizens, in a climate where police action demonstrates this as acceptable. We are making Black Friday (November 28, 2014) a nationwide day of action and retail boycott. Don’t spend: take action. Your dollars matter and so does your voice. Will you join us?

Black Friday: From Buy Nothing To Independence Day

November 27, 2014 Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk, www.truth-out.org Resist! Capitalism, Consumerism, Marketing

Everything evolves. It's the movement of life through time. Those things that are fit for purpose evolve into something even more fit, better adapted and more powerful; those that don't fall by the wayside, or worse, sputter along. Buy Nothing Day, first conceived in Mexico in 1992, and taken to scale by Adbusters magazine, is a wonderful, powerful idea. It has captured the imaginations of thousands of people, all across the world, and bound them together around the idea that deep and lasting happiness cannot be packaged and sold, and it certainly doesn't come in a can of Coke or at the wheel of the latest Audi.

Saving the Planet, One Meal At A Time

November 11, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com Create! Animal Rights, Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism

My attitude toward becoming a vegan was similar to Augustine’s attitude toward becoming celibate—“God grant me abstinence, but not yet.” But with animal agriculture as the leading cause of species extinction, water pollution, ocean dead zones and habitat destruction2, and with the death spiral of the ecosystem ever more pronounced, becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species. It is one that my wife—who was the engine behind our family’s shift—and I have made. Animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all worldwide transportation combined—cars, trucks, trains, ships and planes.3 Livestock and their waste and flatulence account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51 percent of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.4Livestock causes 65 percent of all emissions of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 296 times more destructive than carbon dioxide.5

We are Students NOT Customers – Global Week of Action

November 8, 2014 International Student Movement, www.facebook.com Resist! Consumerism, Student Activism

We are calling for a Global Week of Action to reclaim education. The International Student Movement (ISM) is a platform consisting of many individuals and groups from different parts of the world. A group of students associated with the ISM came together during a series of chat meetings and decided to call for a coordinated action worldwide. We will UNITE in solidarity, because no matter where we live, we face the same struggle against profit-driven interests and their hold on education. Budget cuts, outsourcing, school closures, climbing costs of living and tuition fees among other phenomena, are all linked to an increasing commercialization and privatization of education. Uniting globally is our answer to these obstacles - fighting for emancipatory education for all. Students across the globe are drowning in debt.

On Climate Impasse: Appetite And Substitutes

March 29, 2014 Subhankar Banerjee, www.climatestorytellers.org Educate! Climate Change, Consumerism

On Monday, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change plans to release the second part, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, of the multi–part Fifth Assessment Report. Till then, here is a bit more on climate impasse. This piece is part II of a multi–part exploration on ‘climate impasse’. Most nation states are not interested in solving the climate crisis. This state of collective global inaction is what I call climate impasse. For the sake of continuity, I’ll repeat one paragraph from part I: The climate impasse is rooted, not simply in our dependence on a fossil fuel economy, but more broadly, in our love affair with mass consumption, made possible by global capitalism, and in our faith in Progress—that science and technology will forever improve the conditions of human life.

Earth vs. Super Bowl: High Holiday Of Waste By The Numbers

February 2, 2014 Lindsay Abrams, www.salon.com Educate! Consumerism, Environment

The 48th annual Super Bowl is making a play to be “the most environmentally friendly yet.” And for those who’ve scored tickets, this may well turn out to be the case. Over at MetLife Stadium, event organizers are planting trees to offset carbon emissions and powering generators with biofuels. They’re collecting electronic waste in New York and New Jersey to help make a “positive environmental impact” on their host cities. They’re even serving local and organic concessions. Which will then be composted. Those of us watching at home, however, are obliged to honor no such commitment to green living. On the contrary, it’s days like this — the biggest feast of excess this side of Thanksgiving — that tend to bring out the worst in us. Get three-fourths of America (that’s 181 million of us) together and in a celebratory mood, build up as much consumerist hype as you can, and yeah, we’re going to be wasteful.

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