Affluenza: Adulthood (Part 2)

Our final installment in the Affluenza series.  On this weeks show we finish taking a look at the history of Affluenza [Defined by Wikipedia as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more"].  We start with the explosion of TV in the post-WWII economy and work our way thru the introduction of credit cards, presidential campaigns that employ advertisers (1952), the philosophy of retail shopping, the hippie movement, Jimmy Carter's stunning anti-consumerism speech, the deregulation of the Reagan era and how Microsoft convinced millions of consumers to install active cameras and microphones in living rooms across the country. [Click to Listen]

Affluenza: Adulthood (Part 1)

So, our part II of this series turned out to run so long that we broke it up into two parts.  On this weeks show we take a look at the history of Affluenza [Defined by Wikipedia as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more"], starting in 1870 with the appearance of the first luxury department stores and end with the madness of the post-WWII economic boom.  Are we, as human beings, natural consumers or have we just been programmed to be obedient shopping slaves?  Trick question; it's the latter. [Click to Listen]

Affluenza: Children

In part I of a two part series, we take a look at the disease know as "affluenza".  Defined by Wikipedia affluenza is "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more".  On this episode, we take a look at the way affluenza harms the youngest among us - children.  Before they can form a coherent thought or utter a coherent word, advertisers (working with child psychologists) try their hardest to get inside children's heads and make them mindless consumers for life.  [Click to Listen]

Black Friday Buying Options

Consumers in the United States just spent nearly 60 billion dollars (mostly with credit cards) over the Black Friday weekend on products made with slave labor (in countries with little to no environmental regulations) that will eventually fill up landfills and ruin this planet a little faster.  What else could we have spent that money on? [Click to Listen]

How to Manufacture News Stories (Rebroadcast)

This episode was released on March 16th, 2013:
In November of 2012, the University of California at Irvine and Slate.com teamed up to conduct and then publish the findings of a very telling social experiment...how do we (human beings) remember news stories?  Over 5,000 people participated in the study and the results provide quite an insight as to how news stories can be manufactured, presented and accepted as true. [Click to Listen]