Because I'm in the process of moving across country, I will have to suspend this blog until mid-January. After this blog, I will rerun some of my past favorites. When I resume, I think I will abandon political critiques and turn to cultural critiques--but I'll still be on the warpath against dreck.

 If “Black Friday” is ironic, “Black Thanksgiving” is an oxymoron. Americans supposedly celebrate the richness of our country on Thursday, but on Friday we express the greed capitalism has instilled in us by flocking to Walmart to buy cheap goods.

Those cheap goods, however, come from underpaid workers and gutted towns that gave Walmart tax breaks to locate downtown. After Walmart  lured towns into giving them tax breaks in exchange for bringing jobs, after they destroyed the center of a town by wiping out small businesses, they invariably moved their operation to the outskirts of town when the time came to start paying taxes.
They buy cheaply from offshore suppliers who treat their workers even worse than Walmart treats its own workers here in the US, as the recent deadly garment factory fire in Bangladesh shows.
Long ago, people made most of what they used, which engendered a natural relationship between each person and the work they did. “Value” did not mean price. The farmer’s wife spent several days putting up canned goods to feed her family for a year. Value was that year of sustenance.
People didn’t sever objects from their intrinsic value, which could be either utilitarian or sentimental. Only after the capitalists convinced us that wearing a particular watch or driving a particular car elevated our own worth did alienation from real value occur. They also convinced us that their profits were worth sending our sons overseas to die for.
Desire is the engine of capitalism. To create desire, capitalists hire professional manipulators. Through image and language, no matter how distorted, these specialists produce mass desire, which leads to profits. Profits are the real worth of a worker’s efforts now. We imagine that we labor for an hourly or a monthly wage, that our skills stand on one side of an equal sign with salary on the other. This delusion enables the capitalist to perform his sleight of hand, hiding the lion’s share of what each worker produces: profit.
But profits are tricky. In the normal course of events, they shrink.

“We saw this when IBM and Apple started making a lot of money with home computers around 1990. Before you could blink, there were dozens of companies making home computers and they became cheaper every year.” CPSUA 

In other words, if one producer meets with great success, others move in on his territory. There’s a reason drug lords fight over territory and there’s a reason capitalists seek to destroy their competitors. But they can never rest comfortably because they know a successful enterprise will attract steady competition.
All of which means that expanding markets are vital to sustain any business. In order to expand, the industrialist creates greater and greater desire. As breastfeeding gained traction in the United States, manufacturers of baby formula moved overseas, into third world markets, convincing new mothers that breastfeeding was not the healthiest way to nourish their children.  In many cases, clean water was unavailable and infants thus developed dysentery. In some instances, impoverished mothers diluted the formula to stretch it and their infants died of malnutrition. These practices continue today, and all because American mothers have turned away from formula while manufacturers must continue to expand their sales. Business Insider
Is capitalism itself sustainable? Many Americans have begun to resent the degradation of social values that seems integral to a capitalist system. Money itself becomes an object, not a means of trading for goods. Stockpiling money, which should be regarded as fetishistic, instead marks an individual as disciplined and sensible. Accumulating more money than one can spend in a lifetime draws praise and admiration, not contempt for a hoarder.
When I was about nine, my brother loaned me a quarter, telling me I had to pay him fifty cents in return. My mother found out and denounced the transaction as “usury,” a word never heard anymore. Charging twice what is loaned, once considered disgustingly greedy, has become instead a low point in loaning. Think of the home mortgage. For the first several years, the home “owner” pays nothing but interest to the bank.
We talk about the materialism of Christmas as if materialism itself were acceptable, just not on that particular holiday. Of course, we could go into the creation of Santa Claus and Christmas itself as an alternative to a pagan holiday, suggesting nothing particularly holy about the day and everything calculating about it, an attitude perfectly in line with capitalism’s modus operandi.
In fact, we have grown blind to the displacement of value. We have people swearing allegiance to a showy “simplicity” movement, putatively attempting to restore our idealized past. But does it make sense to reject objects as a way of instilling real value in our lives? Doesn’t that somehow extend the elevation of their significance?
Returning to a time when labor consumed all daylight hours doesn’t resist the exploitation our culture endorses. Developing critical thinking skills in our young people would make a good start toward unraveling the tangled web of deception under which we currently (and truly) labor. Take Rolex, for example. They advertise that it takes a year to build a Rolex. Here are the facts:

A group of watch experts got together and did some math based on some publicly available information in order to either validate or invalidate Rolex's claim that it takes a year to make a Rolex that Rolex uses in their advertising. This group determined that Rolex produces nearly 1,000,000 watches per year.  800,000 of those watches are recorded by the COSC.   Rolex also produces pieces that are not certified by the COSC.

Rolex publicly claims to have approximately 5,000 employees. Watch experts know from figures released by other mass producers of watches that approximately 2/3 of employees of watch companies work in the production of the watches. This means that approximately 3,000 employees are producing nearly 1,000,000 Rolex watches per year.

Each of these employees  is not a watchmaker.  Many are involved in running machines that produce massive quantities of components and watch cases, etc. Take into account that people typically only work 5 days a week and also have a couple of weeks of vacation time and also have sick time and holidays off of work and you come up with 1,000,000 watches per  approximately 240 days.   So that means that Rolex is churning out  something like 4100 watches per day.  Every day of the work week.

Rolex watches are not rare.  They are mass produced and very overpriced for what they are.  And here is a news flash.  The stainless steel that they use is no better than the steel that anybody else uses.  And the brass that is used in making the movements is very inexpensive.  Rolex mass produces probably more watches than those who make the replicas of the Submariners that sell for $50.00.  And the materials cost probably very, very similar amounts.  What do you think the markup is on a $5,000.00 Rolex with a stainless steel case from pure manufacturing cost?  It is enormous!

Many other high end Swiss brands follow similar business models. Rolex Review

But having one on your wrist marks you as special, no?