Utilizing the public education system and the corporate media, CEO's, major shareholders of massive corporations, obscenely wealthy individuals, and political heavy hitters in the United States and Israel work tirelessly to keep the "other" 99% of the population spending, consuming, and manifesting the American Way.
Subjecting the rest of the world's citizens to its perverse mélange of predatory capitalism, militarism, self-absorption, narcissism, hubris, avarice, and acute paranoia, the corporatocracy of the United States of America uses its unprecedented military and economic power to ram the American Way down their collective throats.
Cultural genocide and the establishment of ruthless oligarchies be damned! "Free markets", a win at all costs mentality, obsessive hedonism, perpetual war, and the relentless pursuit of profit at the expense of human beings are the United States' gifts to the world.
Contrary to the tripe peddled by revisionist historians and the corporate media, the world's "benevolent" superpower has not been spreading an enlightened and democratic socioeconomic system around the globe.
Reality Intrudes....How Rude!
In his essay entitled (1)Greed, Julian Edney provides a thought-provoking analysis of the impact the American Way has had on the populace in its country of origin.
Consider this excerpt:
"Modern analysts Cook and Frank show free market competition has become so stark that we are becoming a winner-takes-all society (17). In a giant economy, aggressive acquisition, greed, where so widespread and popular as to be celebrated, has resulted in colossal differences, so that, as much as we are accustomed to reproaching the Europeans for their inequalities, we are now caught in a lie. We have become more unequal. The United States is the wealthiest nation. But its 20.3 percent child poverty rate ranks worse than all European nations (18).
Historians Will and Ariel Durant (19) estimated in their survey that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest in America has become greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome."
And sample some of Henry Giroux's insight from his article "The Politics of Disposability" (which recently appeared in The Toronto Star):
"The bodies that repeatedly appeared all over New Orleans days and weeks after it was struck by Hurricane Katrina also revealed the emergence of a new kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves. The deeply existential and material questions regarding who is going to die and who is going to live in this society are now centrally determined by race and class. Katrina lays bare what many people in the United States do not want to see: large numbers of poor black and brown people struggling to make ends meet, benefiting very little from a social system that makes it difficult to obtain health insurance, child care, social assistance, cars, savings, and minimum-wage jobs, if lucky, and instead offers to black and brown youth bad schools, poor public services, and no future, except a possible stint in the penitentiary. As Janet Pelz in the Sept. 19, 2005 Seattle Post-Intelligencer rightly insisted, "These are the people the Republicans have been teaching us to disdain, if not hate, since President Reagan decried the moral laxness of the welfare mom."
Despite the United States presenting the American Way as an offer the rest of the world can't refuse, increasing numbers of nations and groups are successfully resisting. Since opposition threatens their relentlessly acquisitive agenda, the US power elite demonize leaders like Hugo Chavez and nations like Iran. In reality, those who reject the dictates of the American Empire are worthy of respect for refusing to bend over for an unlubricated fist-fuck.
Anyone up for a little game of human extinction?
Aside from the obvious moral depravity and numerous social injustices associated with our greed-driven socioeconomic paradigm, there is a particularly grave pragmatic consequence from which no human being can escape. The American Way is a path to extinction, particularly as the citizens of populous nations like China and India race to satiate themselves in the orgy conspicuous consumption. The Earth cannot sustain 6.5 billion people living the "American Way".
How can we measure the sustainability of life on Earth? One means at our disposal is to examine ecological footprints. Each nation has an ecological footprint which (according to Wikipedia) is the amount of land and water area a person or a human population would need to provide the resources required to sustainably support itself and to absorb its wastes, given prevailing technology.
To gain perspective on how unsustainable the American Way truly is, consider that the average US citizen exerts 52 times the ecological pressure as the average Somali. At 9.57 hectares per capita, the United States has the world's largest ecological footprint. (Bangladesh's .5 represents the other end of the spectrum). If every nation had the same global footprint as the United States, we would need 5 Earths to support global consumption!
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