Capitalism under the microscope

Annie Leonard has passionately researched and written a book she titles: The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with the Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change (2010). I haven't yet finished her book, although I'd like to post on one point she strongly makes early on, a point that is the elephant in the room regarding most discussions of the American way of life. It is a topic not far from the hearts of the many free market fundamentalists out there. The topic is whether it's time to put capitalism under the microscope. Here's what Leonard has to say:

[There is no doubt we will reach the planet's carrying capacity; we're heading in that direction now.... a big part of the problem we face today is that our dominant economic system values growth as a goal unto itself, above all else. That's why we use the gross to metric product, or GDP as a standard measure of success.... All right. Are you ready? I'm going to say it: this critique of economic growth is a critique of many aspects of capitalism as it functions in the world today. There. I said the word: "capitalism." It's the Economic-System-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. When writing the film script of The Story of Stuff, my intent was to describe what I saw in my years on the trail of trash, visiting factories and dumps and learning about how things are made, use, and thrown away around the world. I certainly didn't sit down and figure out how to explain the flaws of capitalism. It was trash, not economics, that was originally on my mind. So at first it took me by surprise that some commentators called the film "an ecological critique of capitalism" or "anti-capitalist."... it turns out that a hard look at how we make and use and throwaway Stuff reveals some pretty deep problems caused by core functions of a specific economic system called capitalism. There's no way around it: capitalism, as it currently functions, is just not sustainable.... Yet, in the United States, were still hesitant to broach this unmentionable subject, fearful of being labeled unpatriotic, unrealistic, or insane. Elsewhere in the world, there's a widespread recognition that some aspects of capitalism aren't working well for the majority of the world's people or for the planet; people talk about it openly.... Can we put capitalism on the table and talk about it with the same intellectual rigor that we welcome for other topics? Can we examine the failures of capitalism without falling into generations-old stereotypes and without being accused of being un-American? Refusing to talk about it doesn't make the problems disappear. I believe the best way to honor our country is to point out when it's going astray, instead of sitting here silently as many economic, environmental, and social indices worsen. Now would be a good time to start looking at what we could do differently, and what we could do better.... The belief that infinite economic growth is the best strategy for making a better world has become like a secular religion in which all our politicians, economists, and media participate; it is seldom debated, since everyone is supposed to just accept it as true. Why are so few people willing to challenge, or even critically discuss, an economic model that so clearly isn't serving the planet and the majority of its people. I think one reason is that the economic model is nearly invisible to us. ... [W]e tend to forget that were viewing the world through the paradigm, like it's a pair of contact lenses.... before we can change a paradigm, we need to identify it as a paradigm rather than assume it is truth. [Starting at page xviii]

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Debtors’ Prison Still A Reality?

According to a recent article by Chris Serres at the Minnesota Star Tribune, courts still order debtors to go to jail when they can't afford to pay a judgment. Not only are the national media largely unaware of this phenomenon, but The New Yorker published an article last April that characterizes debtors' prisons as a pre-20th Century institution, and describes the America as a refuge for debtors.

As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the American colonies were debtors on arrival. Some colonies were, basically, debtors’ asylums. By the seventeen-sixties, sympathy for debtors had attached itself to the patriot cause.

Jill Lepore of The New Yorker goes on to describe how American treatment of debt has evolved to allow bankruptcy and why this is a good thing.

Debtors’ prison was abolished, and bankruptcy law was liberalized, because Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle, and not of fate or divine retribution.

Even Wikipedia describes debtors' prisons as a thing of the past, or at least an unconstitutional one, according to this 2009 New York Times editorial, "The New Debtors' Prisons."

20th Century Debtors' Prison

Times have changed. To be sure, most Americans who are deep in credit card debt do not have bench warrants issued for their arrest. However, in Illinois, Indiana and other states, a person who's gotten a judgment entered against them can miss a court date and find themselves being hounded by the police.

What about the argument that defendants may owe the money they are being sued for, and should have gone to court? Perhaps the threat of jail is the only way to make them appear in court.

Reporters from The New York Times and The Federal Trade Commission have found that the collection industry is in dire need of repair, and cited numerous, ubiquitous problems. Some of these problems are startling. To wit:

[More . . . ]

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Christian Rock and the Banality of The Market

Personal gripe time. This is one of those instances where I believe The Market is a hydrocephalic moron and people who put their undying faith in get what they deserve. Shortly after the 4th of July just past, a St. Louis radio station changed hands. KFUO 99.1 FM had, for sixty-plus years, been our commercial classical station. Before the first Gulf War, our local NPR affiliate, KWMU, was largely a classical music broadcaster, but after that first foray into Mid east adventurism they became pretty much All Talk All Day. Mind you, I like some of what they offer---Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, Diane Rheem---but I am a lover of music. My youth, in regards to radio, was all about music. I cannot tolerate most of Talk Radio, especially the right wing stuff, but I'm not overly fond of the left wing blatherings, either. Give me a good solid news show twice a day and then fill the airwaves with music. This has become a subject of nostalgia for me, because for the most part the music scene on radio has devolved into mind-numbing banality and repetition. Catering to The Market has the net result of leavening out at the lowest common denominator, so instead of fascinating, new, or just first-rate music, we get the cuts that will appeal to the greatest number of whatever demographic a given station thinks it's playing to. After KWMU went All Talk, little by little I began listening to KFUO. They did not do as good a job, overall, as KWMU---I am a firm believer in airing complete works, so when I am offered A Movement of a symphony or what have you I am turned off; I want the whole damn thing or don't bother (this is also true of other genres as well: I once got into a shouting match with a DJ over his insistence of playing the three-minute version of an Emerson, Lake & Palmer track that, in its fullness, ran to twelve minutes, and he demanded to know who wanted to listen to all that synthesizer soloing, to which I replied "people who like ELP, you moron!" Needless to say, I lost that one, but I resent the whole assumption that the attention span of people will never exceed five minutes---if you assume that and that's all you give them, you train them to have short attention spans)---but it was classical music, and I find myself, aging that I am, more and more indulging in that genre (if genre it is) out of sheer boredom and impatience with most other forms. At least, on the radio. So KFUO became my car station. (At home I listen to albums. I would eliminate DJs and commercials if I could. Playing my own discs, I can.) Due to the demands of The Market, the impatience of shareholders, etc etc, management at KFUO---the Lutheran Church, basically---sold the station. It is now Joy 99, playing contemporary Christian pop...stuff. I've attempted to listen to some of it, but I find it unremittingly boring. And I am pissed. Where can I now go on the radio to get classical music? Well, KWMU has taken advantage of the new high definition broadcast tech to split itself into multiple channels and has one dedicated to classical music. But I can't get that in the car. Can't get at home on my stereo, either, unless I buy new equipment, which is a source of resentment as well. We live in an age where if one does not have the latest, most up-to-date Thingie, at a cost of X hundred dollars per widget, one cannot partake of the goodies available---and the media changes often enough that buying new Thingies is now every couple, three years. Pardon my expression---Fuck That! This is the Microsoft model taken to extremes. It is a form of class division, based on tech-savvy and money. You don't have to pass laws to keep the so-called Unwashed out of the Club, you just have to make sure they can't afford the newest Thingie. Ahem. Excuse me, that was paranoid of me. I have no reason to believe this is intentional. This is The Market, in all its lobotomized asininity. Back for a moment to the new KFUO. It is boring. (I am beginning to recognize a pattern. Christian pop sounds somewhat to mainly Country. The southern lilt to the vocals, the excessively forced emotional warbling, twisting notes through laryngeal gymnastics for no reason other than to make use of a single chord for a few moments longer. Never mind the lyrics---I didn't have a problem with groups like Creed, at least not initially: the music was interesting, the lyrics showed a modicum of ingenuity---just the American Idol approach to hyped emotionalism as substitute for actual content. But I really cannot abide dull music. Even when, initially, this stuff sounds like they're getting down with some passion, it's really just arrangement and playing with the compression. The simplest chords, the over-reliance on melody---almost always in major keys---and the deemphasizing of anything that might distract from the primary message of the lyric content. Now, KFUO, having been a Lutheran station, played a great deal of sacred music. Most of which was GLORIOUS. Beautiful, sonorous, majestic, interesting! Composed by musicians who saw no reason to muffle their strengths, but put what they had into such compositions because the music itself was a form of worship, an offering to what they believed, honest and unhampered passion. Modern Christian rock seems to do everything it can to apologize for being rock. Of course, there's a reason for this, since a good deal of what these folks espouse is a typical American attitude that sensuality is an enemy to faith, and let's face it, rock is all about sensuality. So, too, is jazz, perhaps even more so, which may be why one hears almost no Christian jazz.) Boring is inexcusable, I don't care what cause it is in the name of. Somehow some one or more "consultant" companies told the new owners that this will attract a larger market share than what KFUO had been doing. For all I know, they're right. I have little faith in the taste of the masses, as a mass. Most of the people I have ever known as casual acquaintances have exhibited appalling taste in the arts. You have to be aware to be sensitive to nuance, to passion, to genuine merit, and it seems that most people move through life barely conscious of their surroundings. (I once had the most frustrating interchange with a woman at a party who kept complaining that everything I was putting on the stereo was "depressing." Her word. Depressing. What was I playing? Flim and the BBs, Grover Washington, McCoy Tyner, things like that. I couldn't figure it out until she demanded, somewhat drunkenly,"Where's the singing?" Unless there was singing, it was depressing. Of course, by singing she didn't mean opera, she meant anything she could sing along to. This was more music as sport than art.) So after a couple of weeks of listening the all this strained pseudo-music sung by earnest C & W types against the most singularly undifferentiated backgrounds, I am officially peeved. I'd like my classical music back, please. I don't care about demographics. There are dozens of other stations where one can hear similarly banal excrescence, albeit possibly without the juvenile nonsense worship lyrics. KFUO served an audience that is now not served at all, and I can't help wondering if this is at least partly propagandistic. That this is as much an effort to force a single voice onto the airwaves, driving out the specialist, minority voices, as it is to maximum returns on investment. Of course, that would be a bit paranoid, wouldn't it? Except that over forty years of listening to radio I can't help but notice that every instance of a station or a show that reached a bit higher, took a chance on quality, played the unexpected or occasionally controversial---all those stations were, one by one, taken over and dragged back down into the stew pot of "popular taste" at expense of anything genuinely challenging or interesting. Regardless of genre. Mediocrity is the hallmark of the largest market share. Of course this is just me expressing the idle-time thoughts in my head as I simmer in resentment over another source of something worthwhile going the way of the proverbial dodo. There really isn't a plot of this sort. There doesn't need to be, though. Does there? The Market, the "invisible hand (or ear)" will do it for us. Sometimes something is worth preserving just because it is good, whether it sells well or not. I think most people would agree with that. Where the breakdown comes is in the lack of appreciation of how those good things will inevitably fade away unless we stop praying at the temple of The Market. In that respect, the advent of a "new" Christian Contemporary radio station is deliciously ironic, as clearly someone thinks that Christianity is a marketable commodity and will command market share. The moneylenders have a cozy home in the temple these days, in the American version of Christianity, in which the hallmark of god's love is a positive bank balance and a healthy hedge fund. I can hear the protest, "Well, it must be good if it sells well!" Pet rocks sold incredibly well. So did shares in Enron. On the other hand, maybe I'm just annoyed at seeing something I found special axed in the name of the bottom line. Again.

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Messing with the phone company

My phone company has utterly and repeatedly lied to me about my bill. It's infuriating. I call them up and ask them to justify my bill. They "apologize" and insist that it will cost exactly $X every month in the future. Then the bills show up and they are $X plus an extra $15. What do you do, go to small claims court over $15? I'm saving up my bills and I actually might do that someday. In the meantime, I do wonder how many other people are having the same experience, and I assume that there are plenty of you out there. Unfortunately, these do not make good class actions because they usually involve oral misrepresentations over the phone. In order to prove that a large group of people were lied to, you'd need to call every customer into court to testify. Courts usually reject these as class actions. Therefore, anyone with this situation is likely in the same boat I'm in. Small damages also combine with clever arbitration clauses to amount to telephone company immunity. I'm telling you this little story as a prelude to showing you this image. I do understand this person's frustration. Bravo!

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