stacy mitchell: we can't shop our way to a better economy

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/stacy-mitchell-we-can-t-shop-our-way-better-economy-1354289284

"Over the space of just 20 years a handful of big companies have taken over large swaths of our economy. Our banking system, diversified as recently as the 1990s, is now controlled a handful of big banks.... One-third of everything we buy online now comes from a single company. Many people are beginning to question the wisdom of this and they're changing where they shop and what they buy and where they do their banking. What I want to suggest to you today is that a purely consumer-based approach to this problem, on its own, is not likely to get us where we need to go. It can't get us where we need to go, in part, because it doesn't fully recognize how we got here in the first place."

[HiPointDem]

1. +100. I first heard this "shop your beliefs" thing 40 years ago & at the time was young &

naive enough to think it was a great idea. 40 years later, i'm not so naive. economic power is more concentrated, market power of the big players is even greater & they have taken over a lot of the firms that were supposed to be the alternatives (and in taking them over changed their cultures to corporate bottom-line ones). so the consumerist approach has pretty much been a huge failure. maybe 20 year olds can believe in it because they think they invented it, but i don't see how older people can.

first thing is, people simply don't have enough information about what they're buying, who makes it & how, etc. and the obstacles to their getting that information, let alone having the time to study & assimilate it, are major.

second, the stratification of income means that a lot of the population simply doesn't have the luxury of shopping their beliefs.

there's more as well.

[Agony]

2. We can't shop ourselves to a better environment either

consumerism is a dead end

[handmade34]

3. rec n/t

[PETRUS]

4. True.

[marmar]

5. k/r

[socialist_n_TN]

6. I just read an blog entry from Michael Roberts (Marxist economist)..........

this morning about this very subject. Apparently the consumer part of the economic equation is ALMOST back to record highs, but because of the lack of profit opportunities, there's a "investment strike" by the big capitalists. And what investments they ARE making is going into financial instruments and not productive capital improvements.