JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The percentage you're paying is too high priced

While you're living beyond all your means

And the man in the suit has just bought a new car

From the profit he's made on your dreams...

—Traffic, "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys"

Yes, it's that's time of year again when working Americans foolishly blow their hard-earned money on junk primarily because of the thousands of advertisements that tell them to do just that at an accelerated rate during the holidays.

Of course, you're not supposed to know about the mothers and children in miserable conditions that labor to make all that material stuff for a buck a day, much less think about how the Company Men exploit the poor by turning them into automatons.

Just buy the stuff—that's all that matters. If you don't, Shame, shame, Oh the power of guilt! Why do you suppose the corporate networks broadcast the shopping malls as if it were a competitive race almost every night until the end of New Year's?

Oblivious shoppers, let me tell you a thing or two, there are no glossy photos at GAP, Old Navy, Tommy Hilfiger, Macy's, Kohl's...that capture the slaves of the world, the mothers and fathers, the children in Pakistan, China, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, around the globe, and yes, right here in the good old U.S.A., sweating over hundreds of sewing machines for 10 hours at a time, shoulder to shoulder in suffocating, smelly rooms that resemble prisons with no fire exits. And when there are fires and workers die? The retailers simply turn their backs, refusing aid and compensation.

What you see instead are beautiful fashion models posing in a pair of tight jeans or unbuttoned shirts, or girls in slick black dresses selling the illusion of sex appeal.

The end result is that Americans end up in debt to their necks while the high-heeled boys go merrily off to play from the profits they've made on your dreams.

I don't know about you, but I dread this time of year when we're bombarded by the commercial world to buy, Buy, BUY!: the bells, the whistles, the jingles, the flashing lights, the advertised SALES that lunatics literally kill for as they blast through the doors of WalMart or Target—luring the masses in a fit of madness to fill up their enormous carts with tons of plastic garbage and polluting junk, even if they're still paying off the credit cards from last year's Christmas. And the winners are..., as Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, "The Walton family of WalMart now owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans. Meanwhile, we continue to have, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world."

If I could announce a jolly holiday message over WalMart's intercom, it would go something like this:

Hello WalMart shoppers: Would you please put that crap back where you found it and Get a Life! Thank you. Have a nice day.

(sigh)

Why are Americans such suckers?!

Easy to explain: The corporate elite are experts at taking advantage of our good intentions in ways that sooner or later screw us and benefit them. The wolves have been very clever about herding the sheep, oh yeah. But once in a while, an individual will not be easily corralled, once in a great while someone will refuse to be treated like a turkey for slaughter.

Read about Pizza Hut's manager, Tony Rohrs, in Truthout's Editor William Rivers Pitt's Black Thursday: Thanksgiving in the Consumer Wasteland.

Exploit and manipulate. It works for selling cars, clothes, and all that glitters just as it does for marketing wars.

Take the Bush Crime Family for instance: they've pulled it off over and over again, culminating with the September 11th 2001 tragedy, the grand finale jackpot, followed by the Iraq invasion, the biggest heist of this century, at the cost of millions of Iraqi lives, thousands of American soldiers' lives, our liberties, and at the cost of our treasury that is still being raided of billions of tax dollars for Bush's Carlyle Group, Cheney's Halliburton, and many more weapon contractors that have a perpetual revolving door to the nation's funds which are supposed to be for our public services, not for war profiteering. Yes, the wolves are very clever.

Anyways, the point is that Americans are easy targets. The commercial world sells the illusion of happiness: the more you buy and have the happier you'll be, right? Wrong, observed the poet, Charles Bukowski:

the city dumps fill

the junkyards fill

the madhouses fill

the hospitals fill

the graveyards fill

But Americans fall for it every time, including the super rich who also believe that being happy has something to do with excessive wealth until they too fall into debt, not to mention how miserable they become from the ugly competition and the sick addiction to money and the material world.

The meaning of happiness is an ancient and still very relevant question to think about these days. Socrates believed that a happy life and a virtuous life are synonymous. Likewise, Epictetus taught that what matters most is what sort of person you are becoming, what sort of life you are living. Spinoza said that true happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with the acquisition of things and wealth.

But in our society?—happiness is all about conditioning, advertising and marketing.

You want a war? No prob. Sell it. Market it. Politicians sell their corporate war agenda on nationalism, patriotism and security. But whether they're commercial lies or political lies—it's all the same game, the same manipulation of minds.

Ask Donald Rumsfeld. He knows all about the function of conditioning and how it works. He established one of the largest media propaganda agencies of all time, a "21st century agency for global communications." So if you're wondering why every other movie and TV series concerns the magnificent, honorable, trustworthy CIA fighting off the big bad terrorists, and why there are always enemies to fear, and why surveillance and torture are seen as necessary practices for defense, you can be nearly sure that they have something to do with funding and promotion from Rumsfeld's Media Propaganda Agency.

Oblivious consumers, let me tell you a thing or two: the only enemies that Americans should fear are the oil executives and the industrial military complex. Gee, wonder why there are no TV series on that variation of a theme?

How do they convince the masses, you ask? The more you see how the CIA spies on people, without their knowledge or consent, in TV series and films, the more acceptable it becomes.

In addition to incorporating propaganda at the corporate networks, Rumsfeld boasted that it's a good time to take "advantage of the wonderful opportunities that exist today. There are multiple channels for information. The Internet is there, blogs are there, talk radio is there, e-mails are there. There are all kinds of opportunities."

Thanks, Rummy, for telling us about your sick, Orwellian ambitions.

Advertisements spin, shape, mold and manipulate every aspect of the American brain.

Not only are advertisers masters of manipulation, they've known for a very long time, since Hitler's rise to power, how effective group pressure is.

Doris Lessing wrote an excellent book on this subject, Prisons We Choose to Live Inside. In it, she explains how people in groups completely lose their humanity (that is, if they ever had it, as Bukowksi noted: "Humanity: We never had it from the start.") Well, I'm inclined to believe that he's right, but still, let's assume that human beings do have souls and that they do have a thing called moral consciences for the sake of argument.

If they do have moral consciences, then their sense of right and wrong mysteriously goes down the drain once they join the pack, the group, the Everyone-is-Doing- It-Mentality, and when that happens, they're capable of doing hideously evil things simply because the group is doing it.

Or they will do evil things if a person of authority, a professor, a doctor or even a President of the United States instructs them to proceed, whether it's for a depraved drone killing, or—shocking a patient at an insanely high voltage that they know will kill the patient without even asking why, as documented in the infamous Milgram Experiment. It's what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil."

What are we to do about our species, asked the poet Robert Hass.

Conclusion: under certain circumstances, humans have a deep-seated fear of thinking and acting independently on moral principle.

So when all the endless corporate ads tell Americans IF YOU DON'T BUY OUR STUFF, THEN YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN CHRISTMAS, it gets to them, it gets to their sense of goodness, like choking them to death with guilt.

And after all, everyone else is doing it, right?

From the time a baby pops out of the mother's womb in this country, the baby is greeted with smiling parents and—toys. Don't misunderstand. There's nothing wrong with wanting to give gifts to loved ones. After all, this whole Christmas thing got started with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Remember Him? Jesus? Let me refresh your memory: you know—the hippie that stood up for the poor and the exploited? We tend to forget about the message of love and peace during the holiday madness.

Who doesn't enjoy showering their kids with gifts, or in my home, my dogs, with all good intentions? Again, giving gifts is an act of kindness, nothing wrong with that at all, it's how those intentions have been manipulated and exploited for the benefit of the fat cats that's wrong.

There are thoughtful ways of giving and then there are conditioned and oblivious ways of giving, or what I'll refer to as the "ethical shopper" vs. the "commercial shopper." More on that in a minute...

In our society, the baby is taught from the get-go to be a commercial consumer. Part of the deep psychological programming of turning Americans into consumers and shoppers instead of thinkers is the underlying belief that you're not a good American, you're not normal unless you buy things, especially corporate brand name things that are advertised 24/7 across all forms of media.

Advertising is a pervasive influence on children and adolescents. Young people view more than 40,000 ads per year on television alone and increasingly are being exposed to advertising on the Internet, in magazines, and in schools. This exposure may contribute significantly to childhood and adolescent obesity, poor nutrition, and cigarette and alcohol use. Media education has been shown to be effective in mitigating some of the negative effects of advertising on children and adolescents. (Children, Adolescents, and Advertising)

That breaks down to 3,000 ads a day. Scary.

Therefore, it's probably a good idea not to have a TV in your house if your kids are vulnerable to the perpetual bombardment of commercial ads because 90 percent of the brainwashing takes place in your own living room.

Remember, the only way that they can persuade millions of people to buy their junk is by convincing them that their junk is the Holy Grail, the key to happiness.

So how do you beat the fat cats, the high heeled boys at their own game?

First of all, giving gifts for the holidays is based on good intentions. Likewise, money is not really the root to all evil; rather, the question is whether or not a business is based on an ethical model or a model of exploitation that harms others.

True, we can't live a totally corporate-free life in the cities or in rural America. We're all dependent on corporations in some manner or form, but that doesn't mean that you can't be an ethical shopper.

For example, you can support your local artists, craftspeople, musicians, writers, organic farms, and family-owned businesses.

I enjoy giving bottles of wine from family owned wineries. I'll also include a few poems with a note attached: "These poems get better and better with every glass of wine."

There are artists that make everything from hand-made scarves and sweaters to beautifully designed jewelry at arts and crafts shows.

I've discovered some very talented local musicians on the central coast of California, and buying their CD's support these bands, and they make for good gifts.

Thinking of getting a pet for Christmas? Then please save a dog or cat at animal shelters or at the Humane Society.

If you take your time to be an ethical shopper, you'll be surprised by the treasures you can find. And that also goes for farm-grown vegetables too. If your town has a farmer's market, you're helping to support local farmers instead of buying everything at chain supermarkets that exploit workers the way WalMart exploits their workers. Moreover, chain supermarkets sponsor Monsanto's monopoly, and genetically modified foods (GMO) which are extremely harmful to local organic farms and our wildlife such as pollinating bees, birds, and other animals that are struggling to survive as it is.

You might want to think about buying a living Christmas tree and planting it. We need these beautiful trees as we face a global warming crisis—so instead of cutting them down and then discarding them with the garbage, plant them. Trees ought not to be treated like disposable wrapping paper.

And while I'm at it, please help to put an end to the suffering of animals at Big Ag slaughterhouses: try a vegetarian dinner for Christmas. Or if you can't do that – then check out the free-range, organic farms.

Give it a chance, there's a whole world out there with a lot of treasures offered by local artists and farmers, and that way you can put your good intentions to a guilt-free, worthy cause.

And don't forget to check out the excellent books and "Progressive Picks" offered at Truthout.org for gifts!

Okay, enough. Happy Holidays, everyone...

Cheers!

(Photo: Thehero)