Debt, illness and a treadmill of cheap products: Life under our Corporate owned Government
We have food that either leaves you hungry (by not providing certain nutrients) or makes you hungrier for sugar and sweets (artificial sweeteners do this). We have healthcare designed to endlessly treat symptoms without ever addressing the root causes and we have an economy built on credit, designed to keep prices high and us all in as much debt as possible.
It didn't have to be this way I suppose but things are this way by design. Pure science -- behavioral science, food science, health science all harnessed to strip us of satisfaction so that we can be sold more things. What got us here was decades of data collected by corporations in the pursuit of higher profits. Essentially everything we buy is tracked and aggregated to answer the questions that corporate boards want answered: how do we sell more to these people and make more money ? Capitalism is an ongoing experiment and they tweak it as we go along based on what we did or didn't buy.
Every once in a while you get a disposable razor that lasts much longer than the others. They could make them all like that but they have a short life span by design. The first iPods had no way to change out the battery when it finally failed. We have steel scissors with plastic handles. Virtually everything we buy is designed to have a limited lifespan and it took decades and 2 generations to get us to accept this.
In the 1930s, there was a spatula in almost every kitchen, almost no one had credit and we bought things designed to last. This was a disaster for large manufacturers and retail chains but by the time we emerged from WWII they had an answer -- television. There had been advertising before television but TV by-passed the filters, seamlessly integrating ads with entertainment and creating an artificial picture of what life in America should be. The ultimate propaganda machine became a key part of how we perceived ourselves. We were told not to compare ourselves to prior generations or even our neighbors but rather to Ozzie and Harriet, Beaver Cleaver and to Elvis Presley so we would buy suburban houses, 4 door cars and jeans.
Now we are totally through the looking glass -- huge multinational corporations own all of the TV distribution networks. Ronald Reagan was the corporate spokesperson for GE, who owns NBC and is the biggest defense contractor in the world. They sold us on Reagan and he sold us a huge defense build up. It was all one package, decades in preparation. Now, the content of programs is advertising also and we are even sold disposable low-talent "American Idol"s while ignoring artists and musicians who have original points of view and the talent to carry them through a career. We are sold on their invasions and wars while simultaneously ignoring our protests and counter points. In spite of hundreds of channels, the content is in fact so narrow that Jon Stewart, icon of the mature Left, shows us what they said on Fox News the day before, essentially bringing RW frames and guests in front of a self-identified leftie audience.
They learned from Vietnam how to keep a war going. Basically the answer is 'don't show it on TV.' They learn from everything and they apply their knowledge to modify our collective behavior. March 20th will be the 10 year anniversary of the Iraq invasion. I am not expecting them to portray it as a disaster based on lies about WMD. There will be no examination of why we weren't 'greeted as liberators.' They learn and apply what they have learned.
Food that leaves us hungry, hospitals that leave us uncured and information (perhaps more accurately 'info-taiment') that leaves us uninformed -- the country is this way by design and it is going to get worse. It is much easier to see this when you turn your TV (at least the "news"
off.
= new reply since forum marked as read
It needs to be read everywhere. K&R! 
"... and the band played on..."
It's on a steady march there but how much longer do we have to wait?
K/R
