6 Companies Run Your Whole Life, "Made In America" Blames You For Buying In

Meet the Usry family. They are the subjects of a new investigative series on ABC News, and they were set up to fail. 

The series is called "Made In America" and it questions the integrity of the spending habits of individual consumers. It purports to answer the question, "Is it possible for an All-American family to live with only all-American products?"

Good question.

But the folks over at CommonDreams.org are asking a better question - "Will ABC News' "Made In America" Series Avoid Their Boss, Disney?" 


Why is that a better question? We're glad you asked. You see, it all goes back to the discussion of independent media in the U. S. (see our post asking "Who IS Running The Show?"). There are 6 major media corporations which basically own every media outlet in the U. S. - the television networks, the publishing houses, the newspapers, the magazines, the radio stations ... pretty much every source of information (never mind gadgetry) that is easily accessible to you and me. One of those 6 corporations is Disney, which also happens to own ABC. So is this new show (a) taking an objective, in-depth look at American consumer spending habits or (b) distracting us from examining the spending habits of major corporations like Disney by encouraging us instead to point fingers at individual consumers?


Look at it this way:


Would you like to keep more of your consumer dollars in the U. S. economy? Heck yeah. So would we. You and I live here. We're trying to run businesses or earn paychecks or educate kids or write blogs or whatever it is we're doing, and we're trying to do it here, where we live and work and pay taxes and spend our money. We'd like to see some of that money return to us and our communities in the form of local customers, services, goods, programs, etc. 


Would major corporations like Disney like to keep more of its outgoing cash flow in the U. S. economy? Heck yea...oh, wait, it's cheaper to manufacture goods overseas? Heck no. Quick - look over there!


Disney is a business, a for-profit corporation, and there is one guiding concept to making a profit - spend as little as you can to make as much money as you can. So if Disney and other corporations can make a bigger profit by using foreign manufacturing and labor, you can bet your bottom dollar they will - regardless of how it affects the individual American consumer.


So it's all well and good for ABC to ask individual families to see what happens when they try to stick to only U. S. manufactured goods. Then if (and when) a family falls off the American-made wagon, we can all be so busy blaming them for the death of the American dream that we won't bother to look in Disney's direction.


But it's the major corporations - like Disney - who actually decide where those goods are manufactured. If we really want to try to keep more of our money local, they are the ones we'll have to convince.