Sadly, Wiz, most ads ARE shoved down our throats.... like there's hardly a space left in the world that isn't being used for advertising.  We are bombarded with it where ever we look, and that is what many millions of people object to.... the over-saturation of ads in every conceivable location.  Shoot, I've even seen sports stars wearing fake tattoo ads during games... like there's not enough of their frigging clutter in and around the stadium... and on every bus, train and taxi on the way there.

No, advertisers have taken thing way too far... it's like too much of a good thing.... eventually you become sick... of it.  It may have bee true that advertising helped to create employment, and maybe it still is to some extent, but when those ads annoy the crap out of you even more because you're broke and don't have two cents to scratch your arse, they do little to boost the economy or job prospect.... because the entire frigging nation is broke/barely able to put food on the table.  Again, it's the greed of the corporations, trying to extract every last cent from the average joe buying public.

We aren't that bad here in Oz.... yet, but forecasters are predicting up to 2000,000 job losses [which is huge for a country this size] before the end of the year. Manufacturing and retail are suffering badly with high running costs and profit downturns... why?  Because people are just not buying in such economic uncertainity, and no amount of advertising has changed that.  And it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets even slightly better.

Yeah, I know, it's pessimistic, and that doesn't help you any, sorry for that, but this world has been living off credit, false economies and electronic money for far too long, and this is natures way of correcting things.  We ARE going to have another 'great' depression, soon, and it will be catastrophic for millions upon millions.

The new Rome has begun to fall.

He said change was coming. He meant the change in our pockets, which is all we're left with.     

If he had done like FDR and enacted FDR's "alphabet soup", we'd be in much better shape now.

yes, stop tax cuts, tax the uber-corp and uber-rich (get back some of their ill gotten gains) and use the money to employ people at living wages, with dignity.  Remember, corporations are chartered by the states or the fed government - ultimately, they will serve us all, or they will destroy us.

As far as congress actually getting together and compromising?  Much less likely now that all the congress folks don't stay in washington on breaks, and visit with one another socially, as they did in the days before cheap air fares.  back than, a member of the party from the other side of the aisle was a neighbor.  Sure you might disagree with him (or her), but you knew then as people.  Now, everyone is polarized, and hunched down in their own little enclaves.... and its so much easier to 'demonize' the others...

That's largely my point... and why I object to all the 'in-your-face' advertising.  The primary purpose of advertising is shareholder profit and increasing already enormous executive salaries.  If the side effect of this is more jobs - and I say 'IF' - while unintended [more employee paperwork] - it still serves the corporate big wigs via greater production.

And that situation is set to worsen as more companies relocate their manufacturing arms to Asia to exploit cheap labour and maximise profit that way.  The same thing is happening here in Oz... and when you consider the size of our dwindling manufacturing base, we don't have a lot left to lose.  It began with the corporate greed of the 70's and has unabatedly gone downhill ever since.... ordinary jobs are lost overseas while the executive base grows. 

It's like the company I used to work for in the 70's making plumbers supplies.  When I first started there we had 1200 employees on the factory floor and 12 execs upstairs.... until they sent the foundry operation to S Korea and shut down half the machine shop.  1100 employees lost their jobs that day... and the rest of us were driven even harder to keep production flowing.  Anyway, the upshot of it all is that when I was made redundant with the 35 other machinists, there were 27 executives and an office staff of 30... all to run what was essentially a storage/distribution depot.

Oh, and did the price of product go down in line with the cheaper production... even with added shipping/import costs? Not on your life!  No, they actually went up, and have kept rising well above the cost of living/inflation rate, etc.  Sadly, this is the way the world is going, where the wealthy will have accumulated ALL the wealth... then hand out a few paltry food stamps and say: "Look, see how good we are to you."

My power has increased in price by more than 600% in five years.  These days we turn off everything that's not necessary or in [actual] use, yet the quarterly bill still gets bigger and bigger.  The power company execs, all on multi-million dollar salaries and growing, CANNOT justify it, no matter what they say.   They have become the world's new 'bankers'

In a country with the resources and wealth of America, a country that houses more billionaires and multi millionaires than any other, there is something fundamentally wrong when the majority of its citizens are living so far below the poverty line.  It is patently obscene that ordinary folk are being forced to live off food stamps while fat cats live in such great luxury that it means nothing to them to simply throw away a $18,000 case of caviar that was off.  Yes, I actually saw that on some lifestyles of the rich and famous show just recently.  In the same show I saw bank owned/foreclosed homes being bulldozed to make way for a holiday resort and shopping malls.  That too is obscene when so many in the US are homeless and sleeping in their cars or on the streets.

Frankly, there is NO excuse for the numbers of homeless people in the US.  It is truly a sad indictment on a society that professes to care.  Yup, care about the oppressed in oil rich countries, but not its own.  Sadly, we are going down the same road here in Oz, as more and more people are being discarded by the agendas of the wealthy and this useless 'abnormally high debt creating' government.

Like I said before, the slide to the bottom has begun