GET YOUR HAPPY ON! - a meliorist worldview

This is something I have to get off my chest. It’s been bothering me for way too long. I lived in Dallas for five years. It’s a city that shouldn’t exist.

If it wasn’t for oil and air conditioning, Dallas wouldn’t exist. Seriously, it’s a gigantic shopping mall.  Don’t worry, I’m not crapping on Texas; I love Amarillo, Austin, Fort Worth, Lubbock, and San Antonio, but Dallas is disgusting. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more collagen injections and silicone implants than in Hollywood, and more strip clubs than in Las Vegas. It’s hard to tell the difference between the call girls and the trophy wives. It’s the city that shot JFK, and it should be no surprise that Dallas is the birthplace of “Needless Markup.”

Needless Markup is perhaps the worst store in the world. Their merchants sell gaudy and impractical goods at 200 to 500% the actual value. I can appreciate that they have a wide variety of unique and hard to find items, but doesn’t that ultimately translate as “Not Made by American Workers”? Do you really need a Faberge beer can cozy just because Jenna Hilton has the same one?

When an item has to travel thousands of miles in 10-inch thick Styrofoam containers just so that it will look fierce when held in your Gucci-manicured hands, I’d like you to ask yourself what kind of a message are you sending to future generations of consumer zombies? (“Labels. We need labels.” )

Foreign-made goods add millions of tons of carbon waste to the atmosphere when they are shipped here. Diamond hunters and precious metal miners fuel genocide and terrorism with their shady dealings. The American economy suffers when money is carelessly spent on frivolous and overpriced merchandise, when our dollars could be helping to feed families. When we rationalize our purchase with “I just had to have it!” are we doing right by our children and their children’s children? Dooming them to futures of debt slavery and landfills brimming with packaging waste?

I am convinced that no store in America is more responsible for the hyper-consumption in America than Needless Markup. They started it, but you can finish it — with your dollar votes. You have to participate in the market, right? You have to buy something if you want to eat, right? So, you might as well say something with your money.

Be good to yourselves and your pocketbooks, my friends. Buy American-made goods and American-grown produce from local shopkeepers and local farmers (not Wal-Mart!), and give back to your communities. We will all be much better off in the long run. Trust.

Economist.com sends me regular e-mail newsletters. It’s expensive, but The Economist is one of the best sources of relatively unbiased news out there. Yesterday I received the following news blurb about China:

Chinese companies are investing more abroad

AFTER 11 months of tricky negotiations, last week a subsidiary of China’s state-owned oil company, CNOOC, announced that it would buy a Norwegian oil-services firm for $2.5 billion. Foreign investment by Chinese companies has grown steadily, reaching $18.7 billion last year. But striking deals is getting harder. Since 2005, when CNOOC was blocked by the American government from buying Unocal, an American oil firm, many of China’s big state-owned companies have been wary of bidding for Western firms. And other countries are chary of China’s appetite. An estimated $40 billion of potential Chinese acquisitions are awaiting approval by Australian regulators.

Big deal, right?

Well, it could be a big deal. Amnesty International considers China one of the greatest abusers of human rights, and China is the greatest investor in our economy. Because the U.S. is the largest consumer of Chinese-manufactured products, China is essentially funding our war with Iraq so that we can continue to consume. (The Discovery Channel is airing Ted Koppel’s great 4-part documentary series on Chinese capitalism this week.)

Why is China so eager for us spend our resources though?

The blurb from Economist.com above suggest that China is a hungry dragon, but I believe the old sleeping tiger analogy is more appropriate. China is an ancient imperial civilization that knows how to wait for its prey. China keeps feeding our economy as we spend and consume, with little in the way of domestic production. One day we will consume ourselves to exhaustion, and China will be there to buy an entire nation of hungry slaves, who have become too fat and lazy to resist the tiger’s paw. And China will wipe its nose with the Bill of Rights. And who is to blame?

The downfall of the American economy can safely be lain at the feet of the lending industry, the oil industry, big corporations, OPEC, the Bush family, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Clintons, and anyone else who saw the problem and looked the other way.

I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; together they are easily in the Top 10 of humankind’s greatest achievements. For a long time, it seems like the Republicans and the Democrats have been taking massive dumps on our country, and I’m tired of it. We have to make this country great again, but the only way that is going to happen is if we stop our self-destructive hyper-consumption and start taking responsibility for our Debt — all of it.

Get involved, my friends. Contact your Congressmen! Tell them you want our economy back! Tell them to stop selling our debt to other governments!