wind in the sales

I think this video is absolutely the best microcosm of America, and indeed late consumer capitalism, that I've seen since good ol' W landed on a aircraft carrier to announce that he had successfully conquered Iraq. Now, to most people this video is probably just embarrassing or depressing, which are completely understandable emotions. For me however, it is the punchline for a rather long historical joke.
You see back in the 70's the capitalist class in America decided that they had had just about enough of this unionized middle class labor bullshit and got working on ways to pay less money to workers. This was done through a variety of means that are by no means novel or even unusual. In the 80's it was moving manufacturing whenever possible from the staunchly unionized Mid-West and North-East to the less organized South and West. This did a lot for wage repression, as did labor saving advances in technology, but some thought it hadn't done enough. So it was that in the 90's globalization was utilized to use labor in foreign countries with no real regulations, and then import back into America under the guise of 'free trade' and thus essentially break the back of the blue collar middle-class in America.
There was one glaring problem with this strategy however, their simply wasn't a market for the goods if you didn't have people making enough money to buy them. Middle-class America was the cash cow of the century for Capitalists, but by repressing wages the milk had gone sour. Luckily the financial sector came up with a rather cunning solution- extend credit to the consumer class so they can buy and then commodify that debt so as to be able to trade it. Doing this also gave the financial sector the sort of leverage they needed to start doing some truly daring speculative trading in futures that essentially allowed them to invent profit through creative use of economics.
Where did all this lead? It lead to the video you see here. The once mighty American working class is reduced to fighting over ritualized sales on shitty products made by horribly paid workers half way around the world. All purchased with credit cards or the equally unsubstantial American dollar, that as another form of wage repression is worth less every year. So strange how the dreams we dream become reality and then that reality becomes a nightmare.
"All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as
from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation." -John Adams in a letter to Jefferson (1787)