The consequences, even in creating unneeded services and products for the sheer sake of growth, even pointless are enormously profitable. For example, water, is bottled at a cost of a few cents and sold for a buck. Much of it is just bottled water from a municipal source. The consumer has already paid for such water twice, once in taxes and again as a utility bill, but nevertheless buys bottled at a little over 10,000 times the municipal cost. Of course not all of that difference is profit. Some of it goes into petroleum based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, boosting the oil industry and contributing one third of our national waste stream. Bottle production and bottle recycling both pollute our water supply, helping push us to that day we will all eventually be forced to buy bottled water. Until then, our commodity fetishism will suffice; we can buy “Boulder Water,” bottled tap water from Boulder, Colorado, at 11,000 times the cost of the tap water, because, well, it’s from Boulder. The glories of commodity capitalist productivity! Joe Bageant ☀
Tuesday 16 March 2010
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