Ted Rall's Rallblog

For many people, DBA Day is a show of resistance and an attempt to get people to notice that we’ve become so consumerist in our society that we are losing hold of the better aspects of ourselves while we spend ourselves into economic slavery via our credit cards. The news had the report this Black Friday of the woman who maced 20 customers at a store in her pursuit of an Xbox.

The YouTube had a video of Walmart customers rioting over $2 waffle irons. One particularly memorable image—memorable like frame 313 of the Zapruder film—is of a woman, massive gut protruding from under her shirt and rolling over her pants, carrying off four or five of the waffle irons. If this had been an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the screen would have had giant flashing letters spelling our “GLUTTONY.”

On DBA Day, I went to the local Target. Target, Walmart, BestBuy, they’re all the same. I bought two gift cards for an online game that I like to play. I also picked up some Aleve (a pain in my side that will not go away, what I wouldn’t give for health insurance), a Coca-Cola (to wash down the Aleve), and a roll of Scotch tape (to tape some things). I also took a walk around the store. I came away with some conclusions.

The Black Friday shoppers are replacing/augmenting church. I don’t mean they derive a religious experience by picking up cheap plastic crap made in China by slave labor. I mean that going to Target and demonstrating that they have money to spend (or credit cards that haven’t been shut off) is the equivalent of going to church as a social behavior. They do it because, well, they’ve always done it, a form of auto-hypnosis that allows a chunk of the day to not be spent thinking to one’s self about why one’s life is going down the crapper.

Those Black Friday shoppers are not going to stop shopping because someone on the Internet told them to. You might as well try to reason with someone who believes in an End Times religion. They don’t care about analyzing or debating. Take a look at the faces of the people pushing their carts. It’s like the looks people have on their faces when they’re in line to use a bathroom. Weary resignation. Somewhere in the back of their minds is a voice screaming, “Your goal is to get a $39 set of cookware? Do you really think, at any level, it’s going to be any good? But it’s still the high point of the day, isn’t it? How do you not go home and blow your brains out? They sell guns in the sporting goods section, you know.”

Most shoppers, most of the time, aren’t thinking about Marxist concepts or the latest issue of Adbusters. Next time you’re at the supermarket, look in the other carts. Three-liter soda bottles. Jumbo bags of chips. Family-size microwave dinners for those who couldn’t stop themselves from breeding and really don’t care what their obligate burdens (aka families) shovel into their pie holes at the feeding trough. If supermarkets stocked IV bags of high-fructose corn syrup, these modern Sisyphuses would pile it hip-deep into the cart if the boys in marketing could put the right packaging around it.

But, let’s assume you pulled off a Thanksgiving Day miracle and got these people to buy nothing on DBA Day. So what? Do you think, for even a single second, that Target, Walmart or the rest of the box stores give a damn about one day’s numbers? Like a casino, the cash flow evens out over time. If the trend continued for enough years, the stores will simply use staying closed as a marketing ploy to show how much they “care.™”

DBA Day is never going to make a dent. Why? Because—and here (as opposed to all the rest of the piece) I sound elitist—most of these people are too far gone. It’s too late. The egg’s already been laid in them, and the parasite has invaded. Their lives are such hellstorms that there’s nothing that your little pep talk about thrift and self-determination can offer that will activate their pleasure centers as handily as an automatic ice crusher or a one-touch foot-massage bath for $19.99 (ask about our store credit card at the checkout).

So instead of a futile piece of agitprop, the next time someone urges you to participate in DBA Day, fine, Don’t Buy Anything. But go into a Walmart or a Target, bring a friend, and just wander the aisles, not Buying Anything, while you talk to each other. “Gee, can you believe people are falling for it again? Don’t they realize the prices will be lower in two weeks? That today’s called ‘Black Friday’ because it’s all about the store making enough money to get in the black?”

“And you’d think they’d realize that putting a $500 TV on a credit card means they’ll almost certainly be paying $600 for it by the time they make all the payments? And that’s assuming they don’t miss a single payment and get a late fee and an APR hike.”

You probably won’t make a difference then, either. But there’s a tiny chance that you’ll catch one person overhearing you who’ll have that moment of horrific clarity that is so often necessary for an addict to finally put down the booze, the needle, the knife and fork, or the little rectangle of plastic.

Jobless? Face It: Obama’s Not That Into You

Forget Herman Cain’s 9-9-9. The battle cry for every American ought to be 7-7-7.

7-7-7: for the $7.7 trillion the Bush and Obama Administrations secretly funneled to the banksters.

Remember the $700 billion bailout that prompted rage from right to left? Which inspired millions to join the Tea Party and the Occupy movements? Turns out that that was a mere drop in the bucket, less than a tenth of what the Federal Reserve Bank doled out to the big banks.

Bloomberg Markets Magazine reports a shocking story that emerged from tens of thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act: by March 2009, the Fed shelled out $7.77 trillion “to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”

The U.S. national debt is currently a record $14 trillion.

We knew that the Fed and the White House were pawns of Wall Street. What’s new is the scale of the conspiracy.

Even the most jaded financial reporters were stunned at the extent of collusion: “The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates.”

Citigroup earned an extra $1.8 billion by reinvesting the Fed’s below-market loans. Bank of America made $1.5 billion.

Bear in mind, that’s only through March 2009.

“Many Americans are struggling to understand why banks deserve such preferential treatment while millions of homeowners are being denied assistance and are at increasing risk of foreclosure,” wrote Representative Elijah Cummings, a ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who is demanding an investigation.

Indeed we are.

This stinks. It’s terrible economics. And it’s unbelievably cruel.

First the economics. The bank bailouts were supposed to loosen credit in order to encourage lending, investment, job creation and ultimately consumer spending. It didn’t work. Banks and corporations alike are hoarding cash. President Obama, who promised 4 million net new jobs by earlier this year, has been reduced to claiming that unemployment would have been even higher without the bailouts.

Ask any business executive why nobody is hiring and they’ll blame the lack of consumer demand. If the ultimate goal is to put more money into people’s pockets, why not just, you know, put more money into people’s pockets?

Bank executives used federal taxdollars to pay themselves tens of billions in bonuses and renovate their corporate headquarters. We the people got 0-0-0. What if we’d gotten 7-7-7 instead?

Every man, woman in child in the United States would have received $24,000.

A family of four would have gotten $96,000.

And that’s without an income test.

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 100 million American citizens—one of out of three—subsists below or just above the official poverty line. Demographers, statisticians and economists were stunned. “These numbers are higher than we anticipated,” Trudi J. Renwick, the bureau’s chief poverty statistician, told The New York Times. “There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.”

For four decades progressive economists have warned that the middle-class was being eroded, that the United States would become a Third World country if income inequality continued to expand. They can stop. We’re there.

These poor and “near poor” Americans comprise the vast majority of the uninsured, un- and underemployed, and foreclosure victims. If Bush-Obama’s 7-7-7 Plan had gone to each one of these 100 million misérables instead of Citigroup and Bank of America, the IRS would have mailed out 100 million checks for $77,700 each.

This would have paid off a lot of credit cards. Kept millions in their homes, protecting neighborhood property values. Allowed millions to see a doctor. Paid for food.

A lot of the money would have been “wasted” on new cars, Xboxes—maybe even a renovation or two. All of which would have created a buttload of consumer demand.

If you’re a “99er”—one of millions who have run out of unemployment benefits—Obama’s plan for you is 0-0-0.

If you’re one of the roughly 20 million homeowners who have lost or are about to lose your house to foreclosure—most likely to a bank using fraudulent loan documents—you get 0-0-0.

If you’re a teacher asking for a raise, or a parent caring for a sick child or parent, or just an ordinary worker hobbling to work on an old car that needs to be replaced, all you’ll get is 0-0-0.

There isn’t any money to help you.

We don’t have the budget.

We’re broke.

You can’t get the bank to call you back about refinancing, much less the attention of your Congressman.

But not if you’re a banker.

Bankers get their calls returned. They get anything they want.

There’s always a budget for them.

They get 7-7-7.

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL