Quote:
The government, still struggling to manage a severe financial crisis, unveiled two new programs Tuesday that will provide $800 billion to try to help unfreeze the market for consumer debt from home mortgages to credit cards.
So the plan is for the US (and others) govt. to borrow more yet more cash to allow more consumers to borrow more money so as to allow them to continue consuming at the present unsustainable rate that got the world into the financial mess its in already, and thereby encourage that mess to become even more disastrous.
Back in the 50's, and obscure retail analyst by the name of Victor LeBow said :
Quote:
Our enormously productive economy ... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.... we need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.
Wich pretty much sums up the western worlds way of life.
Consumption (of goods and resources) on a crass scale has been turned into something wich is considered not only acceptable, but neccessary for the continued progress and happiness of the human race.
The one obvious problem with it is that it is completely unsustainable, and will inevitably lead (has led?) to system failure. Infinate consumption/finite resources = disaster at some point.
While I feel that one of the good things to come from the global financial collapse will be an awareness in the the average person that resources (wether they be financial or material) are indeed finite and need to be valued more than they are at present, I cannot help but be cynical about the bankers and politicians whose answer to the the current situation is to borrow yet more money to give to banks and so on, so that those institutions can continue to lend cash to consumers in the hope of perpetuating the self-same system that has shown itself to be so utterly useless.
After 9/11, Dubya encouraged people to go shopping. He was quite rightly ridiculed for it.
Now that the twin towers of credit and consumerism are collapsing in such spectacular fashion, and Obama is promising that the ability of the american (and other) people to continue consuming via multiple layers of credit cannot be allowed to be interrupted....
Is now a good time to start pointing out that, really, even tho' there's a black guy (nearly) in the WH promising 'change', that when it comes to the very foundations of western society ie. its selfish desire to continue trashing the planet in the face of all logic and with no regard for the future generations to come or indeed with any respect for the majority of people on the planet who are are being horrendously exploited by the consumer culture of the west....
NOTHING HAS CHANGED AT ALL?