Acting on the basis that profits are not profitable enough right now, legal and illegal migrant toilet scrubbers are soon to face fierce competition, as heads of Foot Locker, JCPenney, the Gap and Victoria’s Secret have abruptly announced massive store closures with resulting massive layoffs. This isn’t a matter of automation, or of foreign business interests “stealing” jobs away from workers in the USA, both hot topics at the moment, but rather the more common though widely unvoiced matter of corporate board-members and shareholders unwilling or unable to say when enough is really enough, even at the financial expense of the workers who produced their riches for them. Consumers in the USA will continue giving patronage to these brands nonetheless, because consumers in the USA are fucking idiots, eager to be bled dry. Even when discussing the hot topics of automation or foreign business interests “stealing” jobs, they never acknowledge how it is the same execs responsible for those decisions as well. The “progressive” John Oliver just had an entire episode of his HBO series focused on these two concerns, and not once did he address this obvious root cause.
Though not the most trustworthy of news sources, Boing Boing is reporting how Amazon bullied Seattle governance into reneging on a homeless relief tax in exchange for Amazon adding Seattle to its hydra-like list of 1000 headquarters. Only, Amazon then reneged itself on building a fancy new building in Seattle anyway. They were literally not willing to do business in the city if the city was to help keep their homeless alive, and once the relief tax was removed from consideration from the books, the corporate asshat shipped itself elsewhere, self-satisfied that the lives of thousands had been further devastated. And not one pundit or customer anywhere is proposing a charge of attempted murder against Amazon executives.
Analysts from the vulture Capitalism firm Goldman Sachs, who the woke actress Brit Marling interned for while in college, have bluntly, coldly asked in a recent report submitted to the bigger biotech companies, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” Because of course, a cured patient means no repeat business. This is actually a mentality that we can credit to Edward Bernays, whose entire career can be summed up as a grotesque display of efforts to monetize psychology. The one-sided dialogues of therapy are a continuing ordeal until monies run dry. Which has infected not only the rest of the healthcare industry, but every other industry in the USA as well, this notion that a job well done means no more repeat business. The old joke of mechanics screwing up one thing while fixing another as a ploy to require the customer to need to schedule yet more work to be done, thus has the same origin as ongoing pharmaceutical treatment replacing any finite cure. A century ago we had the means to create light-bulbs that could last a century, whereas nowadays a bulb lasting a full year is an oddity. Cars manufactured fifty years ago can still be seen on the road, while cars made today will need some form of repair work inside of 3 years of purchase. I have myself had to replace 30-year old water-heaters with brand new models specifically designed to demand replacement themselves within one year of the warranty expiring, with decreased product lifespans being common knowledge for any industry insider. Under Obama’s administration, GMOs were quietly permitted to no longer be legally mandated to label their products as genetically-modified, as this would interfere with their ability to strike profits. These GMOs have since used this as a free license to market their faked products as natural and organic, even when pumped full of addictive chemicals prompting consumers to buy more and eat more, more and more. And the douchebags regularly shopping at the Amazon-owned Whole Foods are proud of their more expensive receipts for what’s actually unnatural products, proud of their own blatant ignorance in taking sales pitches at face value. Satisfied customers in spite of the fisting.
Brand loyalty, as with religious fundamentalism and political partisanship, evades all logic. They present nothing but a weakness of character for participants at every level, from customers to workers to the ones actively draining them all. They don’t care about you, in fact they quite loathe your predictable existence, and the monotony of serving as petticoat girl and having to hold your gaze in a death-grip while its true love slips your billfold from your coat pocket.
So, Goldman Sachs, which has staffed about half of the cabinets of the last 3 Presidents of the USA with subservients and partners, somehow sees wisdom in keeping philosophically dead consumers alive just enough to keep consuming products and services which promise more than is ever intended of delivering. Instead of definitively fixing things, customers are given ongoing fixes, with the system itself fixed to grow profits from the perpetually dying for continuous benefit of corporate board-members and shareholders. The masses, left too starry-eyed by these detrimental products and services to find truth in advertising or to see the writing on the wall it spells out.
To be alive today is to be trained to find problems where none exist. Of the actual banes, very few problems honestly have solutions. Tidiness is a desperately mortal projection. Enlightenment is the understanding that there is nothing left for us, save unending turmoil.