If pollution costs were incorporated into the prices we see on the grocery store shelves, our buying habits would change. But under the current economic model, external costs like pollution are dismissed and passed onto future generations. The prices of goods and services need to reflect the financial, ecological and social costs of their production, use and disposal. The price of food needs to include the environmental impact of long-haul transport. The price of a car needs to include the cost of oil spill cleanups, road construction, maintenance and the protection of petroleum supply lines. Using full cost accounting, environmentally conscious producers would no longer be undercut by those concerned exclusively with the bottom line. Corporate financial statements omit all these externalities justifying the allocations of society's resources to their own benefit, not society's. Under a full cost accounting system, they would no longer be able to skip out on pollution cleanup costs that are passed onto the people who actually have the courtesy to pay their taxes. Cost to the commons, future generations and far away people are currently not paid. -Todd Boyle

Eco literacy needs to be at the top of the educational food chain. Social institutions need to be redesigned and the tax system changed from taxing the things we value - jobs, savings, investments - to taxing the things we recognize as harmful, like pollution and resource depletion. Subsidies for unsustainable and harmful industries and corporate practices need to end and a recognition that unlimited economic growth leads to disaster. With the technologies already in existence, the transition to sustainable communities is not a technical one, but rather a problem of values and political will. -Fritjof Capra

In just 30 years, America has gone from being the world's biggest creditor nation to being the biggest debtor. As of 2003, The US debt stood at $7.3 trillion, roughly $25,000 per citizen. When you add on consumer debt, real estate loans and the nations future financial obligations, the total rises to $44.2 trillion, or $182,000 owed by each American. The Bush administration slashed taxes and launched 2 wars, leading to a 2004 deficit of more than 6% of Gross Domestic Product. Americans now import more than they export. Americans continue to spend, helped out by a torrent of foreign capital, largely from Asian banks keen to see their countries' US-aimed exports continue. China, India and other investors use much of the cash earned from this lopsided arrangement to buy US Treasury securities at $40 billion per month, keeping the country from bankruptcy. The longer American excesses are financed, the more inevitable will be the collapse of the US paper dollar standard. -Nick Rockel

The Bush administration in trying to convince to the world (via ad campaigns) that there is more to the US culture than fast food and action movies has found their competition is not the madrasas or radical Islamic clerics. Their competition is the multinationals that sell fast food and action movies. These firms have very powerful incentives to court customers everywhere possible, they've been at it for decades, and their global reach is truly awesome. Ironically, the creators of multinational brands are more and more determined to detach those brands from anything as problematic as the United States or any other government.-Rob Walker

The US based multinationals will be the first to divorce themselves from the US when their practices have exhausted the viability of the US economy and it's citizens. Their patriotism being contingent upon the level of profit extraction from the consumer & military economies they have propagated. They will carpetbag to other hosts when it becomes more profitable to do so. What they leave in their wake will be heavy unemployment, a bankrupt economy and a corrupted government. -Joe

The Big Empty - Corporations are stifling our lives aesthetically, culturally and spiritually. They flatten everything. They are deadening human existence. There is a profound difference between corporations and capitalism itself, at least so long as capitalism remains small business. The small businessman is always taking his chances. He's gambling that his wit, his energy, and his ideas of what will work in the marketplace will be successful. He can be a sonofabitch, but at least he's out there in the middle of life.
The corporation is the reverse, and turns capitalism inside out. The majority no longer give their first concern to the quality of their product. Since they have the funds to advertise on a large scale, it diminishes their need for a good product. Marketing can take over by way of language and image. Over the years this has produced a general deterioration of the real value of products for the same real money. What we've got now is a species of economic, political and spiritual brainwashing, vastly superior to the old Soviets, who were endlessly crude in their attempts. Our governmental and corporate leaders are much more subtle. -Norman Mailer

Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist government, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country. - Hermann Goering speaking at Neuremburg trials after WWII.

In the past the battle for democracy was fought against warlord kings, theocrat's, and feudal lords. Today's feudal lords are called corporations. -Thomm Hartmann

People are adapting to a society that's hostile to their own strivings, that privileges aggression over passivity, and treats conscience and empathy as character flaws. -unknown

Public health is threatened by a runaway patent medicine industry that is driven by profits and acts with near total disregard for human welfare. And the death statistics prove it. The Lancet published a report showing that adverse reactions to drugs "properly prescribed and administered" had become the forth leading cause of death (accounting annually for 100,000 hospital deaths in the US). This finding was echoed in a JAMA report by 5 physicians from Harvard Medical School in 2002. In 2003, Big Pharma spent nearly as much on marketing ($25.3 billion) as it did in research and development ($33.2 billion). In 2003 a vice-president at GlaxoSmithKline admitted "our drugs do not work on most patients". A senior executive at Roche in 2004 openly said the industry exaggerates the prevalence of psychiatric disorders to increase profits. The top 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 generate more profits than the other 490 listed. -Richard DeGrandpre

Most terrorists have mundane, apparently peaceful lives, but are just as cruel as those who behead for an internet audience. They are you and me, ordinary people consuming much to much, leading an unsustainable lifestyle, committing cultural genocide on the vast majority of humanity, plundering non-western economies in the name of free trade, and imposing our lifestyle and morality on the rest of humanity. Yes, terrorists r (also) us! There is a difference between 'their' terrorism and 'ours'. They engage in conscious terrorism because they see themselves as powerless against powerful governments that have inflicted real injustices against them. We are motivated by greed, a sense of superiority and an unshakable belief in our right to dominate the world. They kill indiscriminately. We kill en mass. Their deeds get global media attention. Our terrorist activities are invisible, shrouded in the pious rhetoric about freedom and democracy. They know they are guilty. We have an innate belief in our innocence. America constitutes three percent of the world's population but consumes 25% of its energy and 30% of its pollution. -Ziauddin Sardar

Globalization might have a bright side if taken out of the hands of the present institutions and corporations that control it and replaced by a global electorate. There are many issues that cannot be solved without global participation. For example: if Australia enacted strict local pollution laws to save the Great Barrier Reef - it is to no avail if global warming and the foreign pollution sources being carried by the tides are not likewise addressed. Globalization taken out of the hands of corporate multinationals and the institutions that do their bidding might help bind us together as a species, rather than as citizens of individual countries. It might allow us to tackle some of the environmental problems that can only be solved with global participation. - a distillation (hopefully accurate) of a much longer article by George Monbiot

On 9/11 we had 3000 innocent people slaughtered by terrorists. Many of those killed had nothing to do with government or corporate involvement in any foreign country. The dishwasher at Windows of the World certainly didn't have anything to do with world trade policy. Maybe the terrorists viewed these types of people as collateral damage, or they didn't give it any thought at all. Since the present Iraqi war started somewhere between 14,800 and 17,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq, most dubbed as regrettable collateral damage . -Joe

Brand America - the richest nation on Earth, still sheltered from the harsh world it is helping to create. The American dream has never been so small. America is suffering from an outbreak of its own values. Until recent years, the US government could say one thing and do another, even in the Middle East. The rise of an aggressively independent media in the Muslim world has changed all that. -James Mackinnon

The public is violated daily by a media industry who relentlessly vomits advertisements in every medium every minute. There are far more marketing companies sleazing their way into peoples brains than useful products. We and our government have allowed this wave of garbage to inundate every corner of our culture and consciousness, to the point it has become the culture. Drug companies have marketing psychologists devising ads to convince people they are ill with one thing or another and that taking their drugs will make us well or happy. Their saturation advertisements and often the drugs themselves are making people sick. All to make a profit. That's all that counts in America, right? Voting is a great concept, but an effort in futility when the viable choices on the ballet have been bought and paid for by large corporations and special interest groups. Much of government is and has been owned by these groups for some time. The greed factor is beyond depressing. Whomever is best at legally tricking or cheating people out of their money is top dog in America. And religion? That's been subverted into a self righteous ego trip to justify about everything under the sun, with the religious constituency trying to impose their values on everyone else. They are religious and know what god wants for the rest of us, right? The ability to change anything seems unobtainable. Corporations and the US government which they control are the economy and have hooks into every aspect of our economic existence. No one can avoid it. We don't have a democracy in any sense of the word. It presently does not exist in this country. A number of large & greedy stockholders, their CEO's and political concubines in the government have manipulated and stolen America lock stock and barrel. The seeds for this were planted at the Benton Woods meetings after WWII and have blossomed into full blown corporate fascism that threatens the survival of the planet. Few seem willing to expend the effort to understand what entities like the World Bank and IMF and agreements like GATT are actually doing to the planet and humanity. They are doing the bidding of all the large corporate multinationals based in the major western industrialized nations and were formed for this reason. What are the options? Anarchy and civil disobedience? If all else fails, maybe the ensuing despondency can be lessened by the pharmaceutical companys' drugs. -Joe