Home Fire #11 - How Not to Want - I. From Whom Not to Buy

Home Fire

How Not to Want

I. From Whom Not to Buy

(This is the first of what I hope will be several pieces on how to want less.)

There is a breed of corporation out there that has sprung loose from human control. They are big, scary, heartless, and command more than half the economy. This makes me feel puny, fearful, and in the dark. Nothing is more disheartening to me than to read and think about the mammoth corporations with their filthy rich CEOs; their dirty deeds and honest work outsourced to sweatshops and slaves; their ruthless acquisition of resources at rock bottom, environment contaminating costs.

Greenwashing

Never believe a greenwashed commercial. Just like the suburban neighborhoods, like Oakgrove Meadow, named for what they destroy, the commercials will show you what the corporation is stealing from us. Remember the Shell commercial with the bright orange fish in the clear blue sea? Wal-Mart in the forest? The smiles in cigarette ads?

Consumers will change brands, switch retailers, be more accepting of price rises, and have a better perception of a company when businesses or brands are linked to a good cause. Cause-related marketing enhances corporate image, builds brands, generates PR, and increases sales. No wonder the linking of sales to good causes has increased threefold over the past decade, and over 85 percent of American corporations now use cause marketing.

Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover

Corporations respond to a more powerful cabal than mere elected governments. Corporations have no eyelashes to bat when confronted with their misdeeds. They are greed machines, soulless entities given free reign by their creators.

But they do have conscience. That conscience is us. Consumers can curb the wantonness of those corporations hell bent on chewing through this world until every dollar’s worth is bought and consumed. But we have to pay attention. News Corp. and ClearChannel are not our allies in this. Paying attention is hard work and time consuming. But when the University of Michigan suspended its dealings with Coca-Cola in light of Coke’s behavior in India and Columbia; when folks boycotted Nike; when the campaigns by Fashion with Compassion made fur unattractive, the corporations listened. Some have actually changed their ways, maybe not entirely, maybe just for the sake of PR, but there is no denying that we are fully half of the supply-demand relationship. Their ad campaigns and guerilla marketing are seen by more and more of us for what they are—hollow attempts to make us seem less worthy, unlovable, incomplete without their products. What a mean thing to do for a living.

By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising... kill yourself. Just planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here. Really. Seriously, kill yourself. You have no rationalization for what you do. You are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Okay, back to the show....

Bill Hicks, Revelations

The first step in becoming part of our culture’s conscience is to educate yourself. Read the books. Check up on the corporations to whom you give your money. See what an internet search on their name brings up and try www.corpwatch.org.

Then use your new found knowledge to choose what you buy. Buying only what you need would also slow the colossal gears of the destructive beast. Imagine if everyone, for only one day, bought only what they needed. (Upping the ante, see Adbuster’s Buy Nothing Day website, http://www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/.)

Sites like www.transfairusa.org and www.nosweatapparel.com are making it easier to find products made by folks earning a living wage. Buying second hand dishes up a double whammy by (1) withdrawing support from any corporation and (2) reducing resource consumption and (3) (I know, I said double,) this option usually keeps money local and often assists charitable or nonprofit organizations. In our household we’ve struck a balance. Rich gets new clothes for work from fair trade websites and brands we know to be union made, while Ben and I are retro-fabulous in our “vintage” wear.

The worship of kitsch is so important to coolness because the hand-me-downs sold in trendy junk shops have been liberated from the stigma of consumerism and the tyranny of the brand-new, thus elevating shopping into an activity of a higher magnitude, that of exhuming priceless artifacts from the bottom of the bargain barrel. Kitsch, in short, is to the hipster what quaintness is to the homeowner: a way of sanitizing consumerism, of endowing it with moral and aesthetic respectability.

Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic

Finally, let the people you didn’t give your money to know why you made that choice. If they can prove to you that the people at Global Exchange should not have put them on their “Most Wanted” list, well, all right then. They will still know we have our eyes on them.

The Familiar Sense of Futility

Admittedly, this is an area where I feel my actions are often fruitless. I refuse, though, to do nothing, to just go along. At least these monsters have less of a clawhold in my house, she said with Grumpy on the seat of her pajamas, the Disney logo on the tag. They were a gift, I swear! At least my spending decisions usually benefit someone, and not something. And when consumers decide what they really want is green and humane, and are willing to pay for it, that is what corporations will provide.

Merchandise keeps us in line
Common sense says it’s by design
. . . .
You are not what you own

Fugazi, Merchandise

All it takes is time—time to learn which corporations are most atrocious, time to determine what you really need, time to find fair trade or local alternatives, time to go through the second hand racks, time to send emails as high up the corporate ladder as you can.

Ok, really, it also takes a bit of emotional wherewithal. It takes guts to face the problem; it takes compassion for the hundreds of thousands of individuals whose lives are made miserable by our “insatiable” demand for consumer goods, who were fed promises and dreams but got 14 hour days and a bunk, mandatory birth control, and still not enough money to cover basic expenses like food. All this without even mentioning the effect of behemoth corporations on the environment, on the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, on the shrinking middle class, or on local businesses.

Confession

My favorite person in the world, my husband, works for a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company. Our eventual retirement depends on his company-controlled 401k, which is invested in a slew of ethically-challenged corporations. This is one of the biggest hypocrisies in my life. We stay because it is safe. We stay for the pay, the benefits, the location, the opportunity to be a single-earner household. We are compromised. My dream and my lie to myself is that we are bleeding the beast, using its own resources to, if not defeat it, then at least protect ourselves from it. How much of that is true? How much is inertia and fear? How would we tell?

Home Fire

Resources

The Corporation. Dir. Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott. Perf. Michael Moore,
Noam Chompsky, Naomi Klein, et al. Big Picture Media Corporation, 2004.

Frank, Thomas. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism,
and the End of Economic Democracy. New York; Doubleday, 2000.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time.
Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 2004.

Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism.
New York; Basic Books, 2000.

Hertz, Noreena. The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy.
New York; The Free Press, 2001.

Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.
Picador USA; New York, 1999.

Quart, Allisa. Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers.
Perseus, Cambridge, MA. 2003.

Roddick, Anita. Take It Personally: How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World.
Berkeley; Conari Press, 2001.

Amy Vaughn