Hi, GideonIgnore Mike Sprout's posting as far as getting constructive debate out of him goes. What his attitude reveals is not uncommon among not only wealthy elites but also many people who are harmed by the policies of these corporations who have basically taken over entire governments.
I think it's safe to say that thinking there's no ecological problems and that global warming is a bunch of hooey is indicative of state of mind that I call bedazzlement or thralldom. Others call it commodity fetishism in regards to the buying and selling of products and I feel that they are both one and the same.
It will take a lot to wake up Americans and a global boycott of US made goods would be in order to at least get the attention of the US public. To get many of them to understand that the material prosperity in America is gained at the cost of many other nations worldwide has always been an uphill fight. I feel many Americans do know they are hated after some go through a vacation to countries where US foreign policy has resulted in falling living standards,brutal dictatorships and big business intrusions that are ostensibly "US interests" but in reality transnationals who could care less about the US public much less the people of other places. When that realization sets in many refuse to face it honestly and that's why the US right wing takes shelter in Christian fundamentalism and the likes of Jesse Helms
makes sure it stays that way.
This "bedazzlement" with capitalism mentioned before is the result of a lot of thinking that other folks have written about and serves as a cognitive loop,and in the absence of events or experiences that shatter this self-confirming effect, can only grow stronger over time. There's a lot of evidence for people who are blindly patriotic,flag-waving US citizens to look at and perhaps change their worldviews but it requires a paradigm shift , which is incremental in most cases, and that's hard to do in a heroic culture such as the USA's where conformity is the unspoken rule while "rugged individualism" is shouted out in conformist fashions such as "USA Number 1!"
It is a soul crushing environment and after ten years in east Texas I got the hell out of one of the worst cultural backwaters of the US or I would become like so many of the people I knew. To tell these folks about events and places that they do not know about(thank the US educational system) can lead to an information overload and when capacity for handling social information is pushed to the limits,
many fall back upon stereotypes as mental shortcuts.Which is a coping strategy to save cognitive effort.
To at least understand this much is something we need before we can make much headway and to get many people who go by their conventional
ideas and notions to rethink their positions over. We have our work cut out for us and some reading too.
