Quasi-monopolist Manufacturers mass-produce cheaper Consumer Goods

If you are a consumer today, inflation is only one of the problems harming you. As prices go up, quality continues to go down. What most stores have to offer you might crassly be called cheap crap.

In fact, economic writer Charles Hugh Smith has repeatedly warned that the crapification of the U.S. economy is the natural result of a Neo-liberal hyper-financialization hyper-globalization model.

Here, quasi-monopolist manufacturers mass-produce cheaper deadly goods with the cheapest possible components, while customers with scant other buying options are forced to accept that few purchases will last.

Planned obsolescence, combined with a free market in name only, creates a rigged system in which downstream consumers are forced to pay more over time, while owning little that will maintain value for long.

Appliances that used to work for decades now barely make it through legally required warranty periods. Metal tools that could be passed from one generation to the next now tend to rust before they can be used on more than a handful of jobs.

When expensive electronic devices survive more than two years, cash-strapped households breathe a sigh of relief.

Just about anybody who is old enough to remember the 9/11 terrorist attacks can tell a story about some product that was so much cheaper, yet so much more reliable, when it was purchased long ago.

Likewise, customer service is more pitiful than it has ever been. Try to speak with a real human on the phone. It is nearly impossible. Automated assistance has eliminated personal interaction from most buying experiences.

Gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and convenience stores have replaced human cashiers with camera-equipped machines designed for self-service.

Even a visit to a grocery or home goods store now routinely requires the use of a self-checkout kiosk when making a purchases.

It has become entirely normal to witness people struggling through the routine of lifting everything out of their shopping carts, scanning each item, and placing the load into bags, before throwing everything back onto carts, paying, and shuffling away.

It is somewhat perplexing to consider that not so long ago, helpful, smiling employees worked hard to take care of all those services as part of the ordinary relationship maintained between a business and its customers.

Cutting out the cost of extra employees whose hourly wages have been pushed higher and higher by minimum wage laws that try to keep workers aligned with the rising cost of everything might help prevent already inflated prices from rising even further,

But it is difficult to watch shoppers performing jobs once done by paid workers without concluding that progress has taken the market experience to a place that feels closer to regress.

Politicians seem to be heading in a similar direction. Politics, as a profession, has always been known to attract at least as many ambitious empty suits as it does leaders of substance.

Still, the great writers, orators, and thinkers that occasionally rose to political prominence in the past seem to have left the stage for good.

Chintzy products and tinpot politicians are nothing new. Whether spending money or casting votes, the same caveat emptor principle applies.

Let the buyer beware. Still, it is worth considering whether the political and economic knockoffs flooding Western markets today have something in common.

A Nigerian proverb warns against small singing birds with loud voices, because they almost always have much stronger protectors hidden behind thicker leaves.

What today’s Western political leaders might lack in lengthy experience or trustworthy rhetoric, they certainly make up with bombastic pronouncement.

Ever since the dawn of Covid-19, Build Back Better has been repeated by young global leaders flocking to Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

When Schwab and his WEF companions turned COVID tragedy into an opportunity for unleashing a Great Reset that would transform global markets, governance and power, nearly every Western political leader agreed.

The synchronicity is enough to make you wonder whether it is your nation or the World Economic Forum that actually leads.

Perhaps as the Nigerian proverb warns, today’s Western political leaders chirp about Build Back Better so loudly because Klaus Schwab’s financial predators stand directly behind them in the bush.

If so, then the West has become an oligarchy of financial elites, no matter how many times its political leaders extol the virtues of democracy.

A financial oligarchy over political power is like a manufacturing monopoly over economic power: In both markets, goods are mass-produced with the cheapest possible components.

The end result is that things break easily, and systems do not last. If Western politicians seem just as second-rate these days as what customers all too often find in stores, there may be a simple reason why.

International financial titans make, sell, and own both and may be planning to own U2.

Sott Sign of the Times / ABC Flash Point WW III Blog News 2023.