blog.postmodernvillage.com

from Special Correspondent T.S. deHaviland

I’m always surprised when the analysts employed by commercial media outlets are confounded and amazed at the perennially stagnant holiday shopping season, especially when they’re called upon to pontificate about the lackluster sales numbers for America’s discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Target. All their befuddlement really shows is to which demographic these analysts don’t belong – namely, the one actually shopping at America’s discount retailers like Wal-Mart and Target.

I look around me and see exactly why we’re not spending as much as America’s profit takers want us to: we don’t have any more to spend. No matter where corporate profits on the whole are headed right now, the fact remains that real world wages for the middle class haven’t increased appreciably in over 20 years. At the same time, prices for such things as housing, fuel, food, utilities, and insurance continue to outpace overall inflation, and those are all things real middle class people still have to buy. Sure, we get a lot of cheap stuff from China these days, but when your health insurance premiums every month are more than your mortgage, even those bargains from China start looking pretty dear.

And I’m just addressing the middle class (what little of it is left) here: the poor can’t even afford Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices.

For as much bad as Henry Ford brought into the world through mechanized production, support for institutionalized fascism, and rampant consumerism, he got one thing dead right: he made sure that his employees could afford the cars they built. With its no-holds-barred, profit-above-ethics, balls-to-the-wall-marketing, contemporary Capitalism has lost sight of this ethic. If Wal-Mart could get away with paying its employees two bucks an hour, you can bet it would do exactly that – and then it would have the gall to tell those employees how great it is to be part of the team. Ford’s workers ensured Ford customers, and that proved a successful formula. Even if you’re the most efficiently run corporate machine that ever hummed through the fiscal landscape, you’re still destined to break down if nobody can afford what you sell.

Another aspect of this is inherent to Capitalism in the twisted way it’s played in the early 21st Century U.S. Success in a market-driven Capitalist system like ours is not really based on turning a profit. Since market investors actually make their money buying and selling the value of stock, not collecting dividends, our system requires continually increasing profitability. So it’s no wonder retail analysts get their panties in a wad when people buy the same amount for Christmas from year-to-year. If the consumer does not spend more from year-to-year, the investor classes have a hard time turning a mega-profit on the annual increase in corporate profit.

This manner of measuring success isn’t really business so much as it’s metastasis. If human cells acted like this and showed continual, uncontrolled growth, we’d call it cancer. If a market does it, we call it a good year. This measure of success over the long term not only exploits (and sometimes destroys, when layoffs run up a stock price) workers, it demolishes ecosystems by using an ever-increasing amount of resources, and forces advertisers to become ever-more invasive and aggressive. But for this holiday season, it just proves how little we regard what Jesus actually said, that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.