0122 

0112 

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partisans 

Power is not a "zero-sum" game

rejectionism...the refusal to be a consumer/to be defined by the economic relations prevalent in our age...promoting a resistance, a partisan effort against the objectification/exploitation embodied in economic activity...

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Currently, govt's reduce aid for domestic programs, "consumers" are forced, consequently, to spend more on these services (rent, healthcare, etc). These cuts affect the rate of consumer spending, driving down the purchase rates that have fueled economic development and sustained the growth of "globalization". The result will likely be a diminished standard of living in the West and a decline in profitability for companies that rely on consumer spending. Government has traditionally been the mainstay of high rates of growth by means of subsidizing services to consumers and subsidizing the market expansion in the process. (Expect less for more.)

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The drama unfolds, partly, in terms of disaffection with a system geared to our continuing dependence on products and methods not anchored in actual human needs, but offered/imposed from without. Costly decoration, a kind of baroque infection governs our relations. Human needs are best filled by those who experience them. Current economic and political activities are based not in actual satisfaction and resolution of these needs, but rather in the endless greed/profit motive and "desire for more" that is the trademark of business grown exceedingly , perhaps dangerously, large. The corporate is the antithesis of the corporeal. Instead of a localized response to local needs and realities, developed out of an educated and sensitive response to the human dimension, the multi-national corporate ethic is humongous/homologous/homogeneous.
The same product, albeit dressed up in "local colours", is placed in varying markets, the extraneous attempting to pass for the autochtonous, the foreign masquerading as "one of the locals" insinuating itself in the rhythm of the quotidian .
Reinforced to some degree by the wish to see ourselves as "worldly", globalization and the panoply of techniques arrayed in its vanguard, will be effective in placing the alien in our midst. Appetites allow for a nearly seamless, yet incremental, transition from the local to the foreign. Local water is not so enticing as soft drinks and exotic flavors. We are continually degraded, dismissed and resurrected in each new desire. The actual costs are high. The social experimentation defined in the "mega-store", the streamlined choices that define the employees that "best fit", the parking lots and post-post modern architectural pastiche, the infrastructure and freeways that lead to the Ikea and the Wal-mart disintegrate the particular character of the uniquely local cultures and situation, notoriously replacing them with a surface identity, easily bleached away by exposure to the next brilliant marketing ploy or advertising campaign. (to be continued...)

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