dinsdag 11 december 2012

'Deskundigen' 54

Homeless Family
In Reizen zonder John verbaast Geert Mak zich erover hoeveel eten ‘Amerikanen’ verstouwen, zonder zich af te vragen wat nu precies de oorzaken van die vraatzucht zijn. Hij schrijft:

Je houdt niet voor mogelijk wat een mensenlichaam allemaal kan hebben.

En bij die opmerking blijft het. Geen enkel word over de kapitalische noodzaak om burgers te veranderen in consumenten, om de bevolking permanent ontevreden te houden. in 2010 werd wereldwijd naar schatting 467 miljard dollar aan adverteren en branding besteed, in de VS  $142.5 miljard, kosten die in de prijs van het product worden doorberekend waardoor de consument zijn eigen onverzadigbaarheid betaalt. Obesitas is dan ook allereerst een psychologisch fenomeen, en geen lichamelijk zoals Mak meent. Het is opmerkelijk dat hij de oorzaken van de Amerikaanse vraatzucht niet heeft onderzocht, want hij claimt wel Pursuit of Loneliness te hebben gelezen van de Amerikaanse socioloog Philip Slater, die uitgebreid ingaat op de kapitalistische onverzadigbaarheid. Hij schrijft:


Our society is founded on overstimulation – on the creation of complex desires that can’t directly be gratified, but to seduce people into a lot of striving and buying in the vain effort to satisfy them. Most of these desires are vaguely or blatantly sexual – erotic delights are attached by advertisers to most of the goods an service that can be bought in the United States. The goal of American commerce, in other words, is to arouse kinky needs that defy satisfaction – in this way an infinite number of products can be inserted in the resulting gap. In such a culture availability itself is a turn-off.

Een ‘afknapper‘ voor zowel mannen als vrouwen. Slater in 1970:

Take, for example, the film personality of the much-ideolized Marilyn Monroe: docile, accommodating, brainless, defenseless, totally uncentered, incapasble of taking up for herself or even knowing what she wants or needs. A sexual encounter with such a woman in real life would border on rape – the ideas of ‘consenting adults’ wouldn’t even apply. The term ‘perversion’ seems more appropriate for this kind of yearning than for homosexuality or bestiality, since it isn’t directed toward a complete being. The Marilyn Monroe image was the ideal sex object for the sexually crippled and anxious male: a bland erotic pudding that would never upset his delicate sexual stomach. It’s important to realize that this Playboy Ideal is a sign of low, rather than high, sexual energy. It suggests that the sexual flame is so faint and wavering that a whole person would overwhelm and extinguish it. Only a vapid, compliant ninny-fantasy can keep it alive. It’s designed for men who don’t really like sex but need it desperately for tension-release – men whose libido is mainly wrapped up in achievement or dreams of glory. The Marilyn Monroe image is thus more a capitalistic ideal than an erotic one.

Net als seks is eten een ‘basic instinct,’ en net als seks wordt in het kapitalisme ook de zucht naar voedsel gemanipuleerd in een succesvolle poging om de consument permanent onverzadigbaar te houden. Iedereen die weleens een McDonald’s Hamburger heeft gegeten weet wat ik bedoel, het bevredigt maar heel even. ‘The pursuit of happiness’ is geeindigd in het permanent ontevreden en dus ongelukkig houden van de bevolking. En toch blijft de omzet van bijvoorbeeld ‘fast food’ almaar groeien. In 2001 schreef de Amerikaanse onderzoeksjournalist Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. The Dark Side of the All American Meal:

Over the last three decades, fast food has infiltrated every nook and cranny of American society. An industry that began with a handful of modest hot dog and hamburger stands in southern California has spread to every corner of the nation, selling a broad range of foods wherever paying customers may be found. Fast food is now served at stadiums, airports, zoos, high scholls, elementary schools, and universities, on cruise ships, trains, and airplanes, at K-Marts, Wal-Marts, gas stations, and even hospital cafetarias. In 1970, Americans spent about $6 billion on fast food; in 2000, they spent more than 110 billion. Americans now spend more money on fast food than on higher education, personal computers, computer software, or new cars. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music – combined.

Kortom, we hebben hier te maken met een significant sociaal-cultureel fenomeen. Schlosser merkt terecht op dat

A nation’s diet can be more revealing than its art or literature. […] During a relatively brief period of time, the fast food industry has helped to transform not only the American diet, but aslso our landscape, economy, workforce, and popular culture. Fast food and its consequences have become inescapable, regardless of whether you eat it twice a day, try to avoid it, or have never taken a single bite.

In tegenstelling tot Geert Mak die niet verder kwam dan de vrijblijvende verzuchting dat ‘Je niet voor mogelijk houdt wat een mensenlichaam allemaal kan hebben,’ is Eric Schlosser op zoek gegaan naar de oorzaken van deze ingrijpende ontwikkeling:

The extraordinary growth of the fast food industry has been driven by fundamental changes in American society. Adjusted for inflation, the hourly wage of the average U.S. worker peaked in 1973 and then steadily declined for the next twnty-five years. During that period, women entered the workforce in record numbers, often motivated less by a feminist perspective than by a need to pay the bills. In 1975, about one-third of American mothers with young children worked outside the home; today almost two-thirds ofd such mothers are employed. As the sociologists Cameron Lynne Macdonald and Carmen Sirianni have noted, the entry of so many women into the workforce has greatly increased demand for the types of services that housewives traditionally perform: cooking, cleaning, and childcare. A generation ago, three-quarters of the money used to buy food in the United States was spent to prepare meals at home. Today about half of the money used to buy food is spent at restaurants – mainly at fast food restaurants. The McDonald’s Corporation has become a powerful symbol of America’s service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country’s new jobs,

aangezien de productie van goederen grotendeels is geoutsourced naar lage lonen landen, waar de arbeiders nog goedkoper zijn, de vakbonden aan de leiband lopen en de milieuwetgeving nog in de kinderschoenen staat. De resultaten van Eric Schlosser’s onderzoek worden nog eens bekrachtigd door de Amerikaanse hoogleraar Richard Wolff, auteur van onder andere Capitalism Hits The Fan. The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. 24 januari 2012 hoorde ik hem spreken in de All Souls Church in New York over: The Costs of Capitalism’s Crisis: Who Will Pay. Wie hem wil horen spreken kan dat hier doen:

Degenen die er geen tijd voor hebben kunnen hieronder een samenvatting lezen van Wolff’s visie zoals hij die tegen de kritische Amerikaanse radiomaker en auteur David Barsamian verwoordde. Nog even dit:  As a writer, Barsamian is best known for his series of interviews with Noam Chomsky, which have been published in book form and translated into many languages, selling hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.’ Professor Wolff vertelde hem het volgende:

What distinguishes the United States from almost every other capitalist experiment is that from 1820 to 1970, as best we can tell from the statistics we have, the amount of money an average worker earned kept rising decade after decade. This is measured in “real wages,” which means the money you earn compared to the prices you have to pay. That’s remarkable. There’s probably no other capitalist system that has delivered to its working class that kind of 150-year history. It produced in the U.S. the expectation that every generation would live better than the one before it, that if you worked hard, you could deliver a higher standard of living to your kids.
Before we talk about why this changed, let’s think for a moment about the trauma the end of this trend represents to the working population. It is the end of the notion that a better future is the reward for hard work. And the trauma is made worse by the fact that there’s no discussion of it, no way to share the experience, because most of the population literally believes that it hasn’t happened.
Barsamian: So why did it end?
Wolff: There are many reasons, but I think four developments in the 1970s were key.
The first was the increasing use of computers, which made it possible for employers to reduce their number of workers, since one computer now did the work of many humans. For example, once upon a time supermarkets needed workers to keep track of how many boxes of cereal and rolls of toilet paper were leaving the shelves. Now a computer scanner at the checkout counter does that. One man or woman sitting at a monitor somewhere can tell exactly how many boxes of cereal have to be ordered at a hundred different super­markets. They don’t need an army of workers to take inventory.
The second thing that happened in the 1970s was that employers moved production to other parts of the world, where wages were lower. Between the computer replacing workers and jobs going overseas, the demand for labor in the U.S. shrank.
The third event was that women joined the paid workforce in large numbers and stayed, largely abandoning the role of full-time mother and housewife. And, finally, we had a new wave of Latin American immigrants who came here looking for jobs and a better life. So while the number of jobs was declining, there was an increase in the number of people looking for work. This combination meant that, for the first time in American history, there was no labor shortage.
With so many people competing for jobs, employers discovered that it was no longer necessary to give raises to attract and keep employees. Since the 1970s American employers have enjoyed record profits. During that same thirty years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC, the wage earned by the majority of American workers hasn’t changed. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, what a worker makes in 2011 is about what the same worker made in 1978.
Barsamian: And employees are working longer hours today, right?
Wolff: That’s right. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (oecd), Americans do more hours of paid labor per year than workers in any other advanced country. That is because, if you don’t earn more per hour, the only way to deliver a better life to your family is by doing more hours of work. So Americans have been pushing themselves, taking second jobs or working full time if they had worked only part time before. We have elderly people coming out of retirement to help their grown children. Teenagers are working on weekends to help pay bills. Americans have committed to an incredible number of work hours per household to try to achieve a rising standard of living. Let’s remember that we are constantly bombarded by advertising telling us that, to be a success, we need a better house, a better car, a better vacation, and a college education for our children. To be financially successful today, most of us have to work crazy hours.
And of course the other thing the American working class has done since the 1970s to keep their consumption rising is take on debt. When your wages don’t go up, and adding a few hours a week isn’t enough, you buy on credit.
In the 1970s we had to develop new mechanisms for providing credit to the masses. Before then the only people who carried credit cards were traveling businessmen with expense accounts, and the only company offering such a card was American Express. But then MasterCard, Visa, and others came along to make credit available to the rest of us, because there was such a hunger on the part of our working class for a better standard of living. American workers started to borrow money on a scale that had never been seen before in any country.
Barsamian: So wages were flattening out, workers’ hours and productivity were soaring, and Americans were accumulating huge individual debts.
Wolff: The amazing thing about the last thirty years is the collective self-delusion in the U.S. You cannot keep borrowing money if your ability to pay it back — i.e., your real wage — isn’t going up. You don’t need a PhD in economics to understand this.
So the current crisis really began in the 1970s, when the wages stopped rising, but its effects were postponed for a generation by debt. By 2007, however, the American working class had accumulated a level of debt that was unsustainable. People could not make the payments. They were exhausted: exhausted financially, exhausted physically by all that work, and exhausted psychologically because the family had been torn apart by everyone working.
Stay-at-home parents hold families together. When you move everyone into the workplace, tensions in the family become unmanageable. You can see evidence of this in popular culture. The sitcoms of the 1960s showed happy middle-class families, but many sitcoms today show struggling families. Americans are 5 percent of the world’s population, but we consume 65 percent of the world’s psychotropic drugs, tranquilizers, and mood enhancers. We are a people under unbelievable stress.

Vandaar de vergeefse poging de onvrede weg te eten. Des te armer men is des te meer men eet, en wel relatief goedkoop vet en zoet voedsel dat een kortstondige vertroosting biedt in een keiharde, materialistische maatschappij waar de ‘winner takes all.’ Als Mak in plaats van zich te vergapen aan al die dikke ‘Amerikanen’ met personeelsleden van de restaurants zou hebben gesproken dan had hij geweten onder welke condities ze gebukt gaan. Eric Schlosser:
 In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of ‘the McDonaldization of America.’ He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by great corporations, and as a homogenizing influence on American life. In Eat Your Heart Out (1975). he argued that ‘bigger is not better.’ Much of what Hightower feared has come to pass. The centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nations food supply. Moreover, the tremendous success of the fast food industry has encouraged other industries to adopt similar business methods. The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today’s retail economy, wiping out small business, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code. America’s main streets and malls now boast the same Pizza Huts and Taco Bells, Gaps…
Het gevolg is dat
Almost every facet of American Life has now been franchised or chained,
waarbij overal geldt:
The key to a successful franchise according to many texts on the subject, can be expressed in one word: ‘uniformity.’
Dit werpt toch een ander licht op Mak’s terloopse opmerking dat
Hoe verder we naar het westen rijden, des te groter de hoeveelheden die onze tafelgenoten bij het ontbijt naar binnen schuiven.
Vooral ook wanneer men weet dat overal in de VS waar sprake is van landbouw en veeteelt:
 you see the effects of fast food on the nations rural life, its environment, its workers, and its health. The fast food chains now stand atop a huge food-industrial complex that has gained control of America’s agriculture. During the 1980s, large multinationals… were allowed to dominate one commodity market after another. Farmer and cattle ranchers are losing their independence, essentially becoming hired hands for the agribusiness giants or being forced off the land. Family farms are now being replaced by gigantic corporate farms with absentee owners. Rural communities are losing their middle class and becoming socially stratified, divided between a small, wealthy elite and large numbers of the working poor,
aldus  Eric Schlosser. Obesitas is dus niet een te verwaarlozen detail, maar een symptoom van de pathologische onverzadigbaarheid van de ‘Amerikaanse Droom,die voor velen in een nachtmerrie is veranderd. Het is geen teken van vrijheid, maar van verslaving:
Obesity in the United States has been increasingly cited as a major health issue in recent decades. While many industrialized countries have experienced similar increases, obesity rates in the United States are among the highest in the world.[3] Of all countries, the United States has the highest rate of obesity. From 13% obesity in 1962, estimates have steadily increased, reaching 19.4% in 1997, 24.5% in 2004[4] 26.6% in 2007,[5] and 33.8% (adults) and 17% (children) in 2008.[6][7] In 2010, the CDC reported higher numbers once more, counting 35.7% of American adults as obese, and 17% of American children.[8] […]
As American families have become absorbed with other activities, formal meal time disappeared, leading to increased snacking all day without a nutritional meal. While other cultures will have a formal, planned meal with the family, Americans have lost this tradition. […]
There has been an increase in obesity-related medical problems, including type II diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and disability.[39] In particular, diabetes has become the seventh leading cause of death in the United States,[40] with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimating in 2008 that fifty-seven million adults aged twenty and older were pre-diabetic, 23.6 million diabetic, with 90–95% of the latter being type 2-diabetic.[41] Obesity has also been shown to increase the prevalence of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Babies born to obese women are almost three times as likely to die within one month of birth and almost twice as likely to be stillborn than babies born to women of normal weight.[42]
Obesity has been cited as a contributing factor to approximately 100,000–400,000 deaths in the United States per year[13] and has increased health care use and expenditures,[39][43][44][45] costing society an estimated $117 billion in direct (preventive, diagnostic, and treatment services related to weight) and indirect (absenteeism, loss of future earnings due to premature death) costs.[46] This exceeds health-care costs associated with smoking or problem drinking[45] and accounts for 6% to 12% of national health care expenditures in the United States.[47]
The Medicare and Medicaid programs bear about half of this cost.[45] Annual hospital costs for treating obesity-related diseases in children rose threefold, from US$ 35 million to US$ 127 million, in the period from 1979 to 1999,[48] and the inpatient and ambulatory healthcare costs increased drastically by US$ 395 per person per year.[44] These trends in healthcare costs associated with pediatric obesity and its comorbidities are staggering, urging the Surgeon General to predict that preventable morbidity and mortality associated with obesity may surpass those associated with cigarette smoking.[43][49] Furthermore, the probability of childhood obesity persisting into adulthood is estimated to increase from approximately twenty percent at four years of age to approximately eighty percent by adolescence,[50] and it is likely that these obesity comorbidities will persist into adulthood.[51]
Morgen meer hierover.
[Sail Away - Randy Newman Album Cover Art]
 In America you'll get food to eat
Won't have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It's great to be an American

Ain't no lions or tigers-ain't no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Everybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog-sail away with me

Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay

In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You're all gonna be an American

Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
 fat-american.jpg



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