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Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: October 7th, 2025
  • foodandart@lemmy.ziptoEurope@feddit.org•A new way to measure poverty shows the US falling behind EuropeEnglish
    1·
    16 hours ago

    I honestly think it’s going to have to be a consumer revolt. I spent 15 years in the Nielsen Homescan Consumer Panel - rebranded in the mid 2000’s as National Consumer Panel - it’s basically the flipside of the Nielsen TV survey and it measures the effectiveness of advertising.

    As a long time Adbusters reader (from the mid-90’s) I was keenly aware of advertising setting a mindset of consumerism…

    So imagine my delight when I got in on the ground floor of the industry that sold data to the advertisers regarding what worked and what did not.

    It HAS to be a consumer strike, that is the leverage point.

    Advertisers spend billions a year to get people to buy shit they don’t need, with money they don’t have. And it works, and maintains the entire capitalist mechanism with almost perfect results.

    Thing is, as I have pointedly remarked at the occasional focus group I’ve been invited to, (then usually dis-invited out the door quite quickly) the question I ask - which is never answered, is “How many Americans get pushed into abject poverty before the entire economy collapses on itself? How much wage stagnation do we have across the board before the people who hired this focus group start to lose business because fewer and fewer consumers can buy what they’re selling?”

    I think we’re coming close to finding that out and it’s why the billionaires are so voraciously hoarding their wealth. I did catch the news item that stated the US has hit insolvency.

    Fun times ahead, and at the least we all have to take care of, and watch out for, each other. God knows the government isn’t capable of offering any legitimate help anymore.

  • foodandart@lemmy.ziptoEurope@feddit.org•A new way to measure poverty shows the US falling behind EuropeEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    When George Bush Senior (remember him? I do…) was running for President in 1979 against Ronald Reagan it was he who coined the term “voo-doo economics” in response to the “trickle down” policies that Reagan cottoned on to that were promulgated by Arthur Laffer.

    What Bush Sr. was saying was correct, in that deregulation wouldn’t see as much capital as possible getting to those at the bottom as needed. He was stopped from this critical angle by Reagan offering him the VP’s seat. so he shut up and took it.

    It was the neo-liberal Bill Clinton just kept up the movement that started over a decade earlier.

    We forget it was George Bush Sr. who put NAFTA on the table but it was Clinton who got to sign it (and take credit for it) as the trade negotiations it entailed took years to hammer out and were done AFTER Bush got voted out… (this was why the GOP hated “Slick Willie” so much…) Clinton got credit for many of the policies that the Republicans put forth, and was more pro-business than many of them were. (The best they got on Clinton was the Monica Lewinsky affair, which they made into a Movie of the Week drama.)

    All of the deregulation that allowed for consolidation of media and stepped up the rightward swing of politics really started however on Reagan’s watch.

    I was there, and been watching it happen since I was in high school in 1980.