Madison Ave. Declares ‘Mass Affluence’ Over

From Too Much courtesy of AlterNet:

The Mad Men 1960s America — where average families dominated the consumer market — has totally disappeared, this Ad Age New Wave of Affluence study details. And Madison Avenue has moved on — to where the money sits.

And that money does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession, Ad Age relates, has thrown “a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else.”

Taking inflation into account, Ad Age goes on to explain, the “incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s,” while “the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially.”

The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.

“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

America as a whole, the new Ad Age study pauses to note, hasn’t quite caught up with the reality of this steep inequality. Americans still “like to believe in an egalitarian ideal of affluence” where “everyone has an equal shot” at “amassing a great fortune through dint of hard work and ingenuity.”

In actual life, the new Ad Age study points out, “the odds of someone’s worth amounting to $1 million dollars” have shrunk to “1 in 22.”

More here.

What do you get if you take a nation with a strong and thriving middle class and then deregulate the hell out of business, lower taxes on the rich again and again for decades, virtually destroy the unions and refuse to enforce labor law, begin an industrial "race to the bottom" seeking the lowest wages in the world enabled by an insidious "globalism" meme, and convince huge percentages of the population that all these "reforms" are in their best interests?

Why, you get what we've been calling "the third world" for five or six decades now. That is, you get a nation with an hourglass shaped distribution of wealth, a relatively larger group of wealthy people at the top, a very small middle class, and an extremely huge group of poor people at the bottom. You know, like India. Or Algeria. Needless to say, that's what's happening to the US, and Madison Avenue, a major player in the plutocracy, now understands this as a fact, not as some wild leftist conspiracy theory.

I mean really, when the business press, and that's what Advertising Age is, part of the business press, starts saying stuff like this, treating it as utterly uncontroversial, just reporting it to their industry, you can be sure it's very likely to be true. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal, as Chomsky likes to observe, is probably the best paper in the country: they don't have to propagandize because they're reporting to the business community, which, unlike the population at large, does not need to be continually indoctrinated. They just want the facts, and WSJ delivers.

If you're an ad man, you are now living in a nation where it's a bad idea to target anybody but the rich simply because nobody else has enough money to buy what you're selling. That's a fact you must believe if you're going to make any headway with your career. So if the business world now fully understands that all that stuff about the "American Dream" is a big steaming load of horse shit, why doesn't our political discourse in any way reflect that?

Okay, that's a more complicated question to answer, but a lot of it has to do with ignorance, greed, and just plain old evil.

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