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MAYBE GEORGE W BUSH has done theworld a favour. When, in March, herenounced the Kyoto treaty on greenhouseemissions (because it would hurt America) hehelped peel away the mask of sanity fromUncle Sam, revealing him for what he is, inall his savagery and nonchalance - a gluttonand a psychopath. Forget the Taliban,Gaddafi or the beastly Saddam Hussein, it isthe United States that is out of control, thewildest rogue nation of all.

The assertion of America's lifestyle rights,come what may, over any other consideration- including the survival of future generations- was made during the week of the Oscars.Catching a transit-lounge glimpse of thisspectacle, I marvelled at its imperial might,its furious flame-fanning of consumer desire.The desire for beauty (although of an exteriorkind), wealth, fame, luxury and crappymovies.

The Oscars are Hollywood at its height: anoff-camera underclass at beck and call, thecomedians neutered, cosmeticians in thewings, the cost of designer gowns rangingfrom $US1O,000 to $40,000 per star; not tomention the diamonds. The confirmation ofAmerica's technical flair and export prowesscame with the crowning of Gladiator , alongwith an unconscious identification withImperial Rome. See, we rebuilt theColosseum.

It is, after all, the illusion that counts. Andtherein lies the beguiling genius of Uncle

Sam - the dissemination of illusionsconsumed as reality. Not just in movies, butin its products, politics and foreign policy:

America is the land of the free. Really?How about an Oscar from the WorldAcademy of Jailers for holding the highestproportion of its citizens in custody. Of theglobal prison total, one quarter isincarcerated in the US, minus the 152inmates executed by George W Bush whenGovernor of Texas - a State that provides nofunds for the defence of the poor. Much ofAustralia's prison system is now in themanagerial grip of a US correctional chain.

America fosters unbridled competition,which benefits all. In media, manufacturing,high tech, entertainment, oil, groceries andmuch more, the giants are on a roll. Fourcompanies now control 87 per cent ofAmerican beef, another four control morethan 84 per cent of its cereal, and just twocompanies control almost 80 per cent of theworld's grain trade. Almost all primarycommodities are controlled by six or fewercompanies.

From such an elite are drawn the President'spuppeteers: $US2.3 million from ExxonMobil helped elect Bush, whoseadministration is awash with former oilexecutives. Another Bush supporter; RupertMurdoch, is now seeking to bypasscross-media ownership restrictions in NewYork and extend his opinion-shaping

Oh say, can’t they see?A reckless plunderer, dangerously high on the sweet smell ofexcess, an unstoppable juggernaut crushing all in its path, aswaggering cowboy nation fuelled by its own grandiosemyths .... Richard Neville indicts Uncle Sam.

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domain. The man who pays the piperproduces Gladiator as well as the daily news.As in the ecosystem, diversity is shrinking.

Happiness is honoured. How come the mostprosperous nation on earth exhibits thehighest rates of clinical depression? Thecountry which wrote the happiness quest intoits constitution reels from an epidemic of themalignant sadness. This, too, is a marketing opportunity. The annual report ofpharmaceutical company Eli Lilly chortles,"Prozac changed everything, and that's justthe beginning."

America promotes the global expansion ofhuman rights. Not according to the record.Kyoto apart, the US has spurned vitalinternational treaties on war crimes, landmines, the prohibition of the execution ofjuveniles, arms controls, test bans and eventhe Convention of the Rights of the Child(standing alone with Somalia). The refusal isbased on a fierce assertion of US sovereignty.

As law professor Peter J. Spiro noted in thejournal Foreign Affairs: "Only free tradeagreements, as long as they are limited to freetrade and do not include environment, labourissues or human rights, pass muster ...because they are thought to serve Americaninterests." The nation so keen to safeguard itsown identity is quick to submerge that of itstrading partners. The key human rightpromoted abroad is the right to shop.

The land of opportunity. Yes, but the deckis stacked. The richest 1 per cent has morefinancial wealth than is possessed by thepoorest 90 per cent of Americans combined;the starkest inequality among major Westernnations. The net worth of Bill Gates,according to Ralph Nader; is equal to thecombined net assets of the poorest 120million Americans. The impact of suchdivision percolates through the country. Yousee it the moment you land at the airport and

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feed a credit card into the trolley machine:the tattered touts, the stretch limos, thebattered buses, the bright lightsof Tiffany's. What's unseen is worse. About40 million US citizens are not covered byany form of health insurance, a figure that isincreasing each year.

And so on, and on: the decline of publiceducation, infrastructure, welfare and all therest. Basically, the US is a republic oflobbyists attached to a global public relationsmachine bent on turning the whole of life into a series of paid-for; staged events, likeguzzling fake food in themed restaurants,while displaying designer sportswear; andchattering about Gladiator's special effects aswe wash down Prozac with a Starbucks soylatte, and remain largely oblivious to thedeeper tragedy taking place on the late greatplanet Earth.

GEORGE W BUSH IS NOT AN ORIGINAL.He is pursuing the doctrine formulated by hisfather on the eve of the Earth Summit in Rio

de Janeiro, 1992, which laid the groundworkfor Kyoto. Bush the Elder said he wasprepared to talk about the environment, but -here's the rub - "the American way of life isnot negotiable". Got it? This mantra shouldbe burnt into the brains of six billionearthlings, because the American way of lifeis now diminishing the life of everyone else.In disaster movie speak, it's PlanetHollywood versus the world.

Already, with less than 5 per cent of theglobal population, the US uses almost 30 percent of the planet's resources. Its emissionrecord is the world's worst, spewing 20tonnes of greenhouse gas per person perannum - a quarter of the world's total.(Australia comes in second with 18 tonnes.)The US consumes a quarter of the world's oil,a third of its paper; and 40 per cent of its beefand veal. The reason given by the USPresident, G.W. (Global Warming) Bush forhis abandonment of Kyoto was uttered withcommendable brevity: "Emission controls donot apply to the developing world." So? In

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most cases, their energy use is minuscule,only 5 per cent of per capita emissions of theWest, while its inhabitants are climate fodderalready, living and dying on the frontline ofhurricanes and floods.

Emissions from developing nations willrise, but let's not overlook the reason. Theirfarms, factories and infrastructure arethrobbing to service the appetites of distantconsumers, whether it's Kenya airliftingflowers to the Netherlands, or Korea shippingcut-price cars. The source of the fumesascending from their smokestacks is ... us.

Meanwhile, the average American uses 10times more coal than the average Chineseperson - and contributes over 50 times morecarbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Theaverage American also requires four times asmuch grain and 27 times as much petrol asthe average Indian. The land of the free isalso the land of the fat; its citizens areplagued with obesity.

WHILE MANY MAYdeny the existence of globalwarming, theoverwhelming advice of thescientific community is thatwe should prepare now forrising seas and disruptiveweather. Earlier this year;the massiveIntergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC),reported that the 1990swere the hottest decadesince the 1860s, wheninstrument records werefirst taken, and that 1998was the hottest year. Itforetold "future large-scaleand possibly irreversiblechanges in Earth's systems". This reportbroke new ground by citing the cause of thewarming as "mostly due to human activity".And this activity is not about to wind down.

The American way of life is not negotiable.Worse - the American way of life isinescapable. And the nation that runs theworld is ruining the world as it runs amok inArmani, dazzling us with Julia Roberts andgangsta rap, making us sick with fast food,workaholia and porno violence, as its hordesof silent seamstresses in tropic locationsstitch Calvin Klein onto our Y-fronts. All forthe glory of shareholder value.

And yet, according to the Economic PolicyInstitute, "85 per cent of the increase in thestockmarket since 1976 has accrued to 1 percent of the population". It's worth it, you say,it's worth it. On highways, at airports, atuniversities, for a splash of change, I canslake my thirst with a Burger King strawberrymilkshake. Even in Kathmandu, probably. It'sthe nearest thing to mother's milk, evokingdairy maids and Jersey cows, asinging-dancing Julie Andrews plucking thefleshiest berries. Actually, this beveragecontains more than 50 chemical flavours,

including yummy amylacetate, ethylmethyl-phenyl-glycidateand methyl anthranilate.Most of the flavour inmost of the food eatentoday in the US isconcocted by scientists.Like the Oscars, it is thetriumph of illusion overreality. It might be badfor our health, bad for theecosystem, but it's goodfor shareholder value.The economy, stupid.

The deeper you dig, theworse it gets. As soon as Iwrite it, I hate thatsentence. It's not that I

think everything about America is appalling -far from it. Many of its products aredelightful, irresistible, like Austin Powers,jazz, literature, the First Amendment, Jewishhumour and the PowerBook. On a dark,

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stormy highway with famished toddlers, I'veeven felt a rush of gratitude at the sight of theGolden Arches - sure, we'll have fries withthat, unaware such an impulse serves toshrink the world's variety of crops. As withother food chains, according to theWorldwatch Institute, McDonald's demandsin each country it enters that the varieties ofpotatoes grown by local farmers be replacedby their global standard, the Idaho Russet.Taste and technique must remain uniform, sothe global potato harvest is now "precariouslyhomogenous", dependent on pesticides ofdeclining oomph. As climate warms, therange and resilience of the pests increase,invoking fears of a potato blight - a globalreplay of the Irish famine.

In my madder moments of reflection aboutAmerica, it seems like it's the Vietnam Warall over again; except, instead of "killinggooks", it's about making a killing. Instead ofpoisoning the forest with Agent Orange, it'sabout despoiling the biosystem. Once a"peace probe" referred to the annihilation of avillage; now the term "outsourcing" standsfor a sweatshop. Once it was the Vietcongwho were blitzed with US propaganda, nowit is the rest of us who are blitzed with USpropaganda. Maybe the old slogan is true,after all: "We are all Vietcong."

THE AD BIZ IS A FRIENDLY HARBOURfor creative types and some of its output iswitty and fun. At its core, however, theindustry is a volcanic eruption of lies: CDswill never scratch, you too can have theshiniest hair in the world, the stealth bomberis invisible, we appreciate your patience andwill be with you shortly. No longer confinedto promoting products, advertising hasinsinuated itself into the culture in such away as to be indistinguishable from everydaylife. It is not just the commercials seen onTV, it is the lifestyle depicted by the TV: thelogos, restaurants, cars, facelifrs andhow-to-solve-a-problem- with-a-gun. The adsand the programs are synonymous. Without

being aware of it, we live inside a nonstopmarketing event.

As insistent and pervasive as it is - pipedinto planes, buses, schools, motels, Borneo -its source is singular. Seinfeld and Friendsare screened on most Qantas flights; themenu of movies-on-demand in Australianhotels is almost exclusively from Hollywood.Does this matter? You be the judge. Whendid you last watch a sitcom from Brazil, apop clip from India, a movie on love andmarriage among Kurdish refugees in Paris?(On SBS, the last one. No guns, no fisticuffs;riveting.) While US content lately honoursethnicity, to the point of caricature, and evenalternative attitudes, the slant isquintessentially God Bless America. "Ours isa wonderful culture," a US soccer star said onTV "We're individualistic, we're competitive,we're aggressive." Her team went on toconquer the local Matildas, just like her"wonderful culture" is set to conquer theworld.

BACK IN 1924, MONSIEUR COSTIL THENhead of the French Gaumont cinema chain,told his countrymen it would be "a very longtime" before French films found favour inAmerica. They were "too strange andcomplicated". Success in the US required "aformula". Three-quarters of a century later;Costil's deconstruction of a Hollywood hitremains intact: "voyages, sports, dances,records and audacious examples of force".Meanwhile, American movies and the valuesthey embody have swept the world. From hisgrave, Costil's final caution has bite:"remember; every American is at heart a'business man'". And so, too, now are we.

The Man from Snowy River; having turnedhimself into a brand, is hunched at midnightover a business activity statement, pitting thedepreciation of assets, including his "smalland weedy beast", against GST. Perhaps henow regrets his capture of the colt from oldRegret.

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Most people I know are working their gutsout, even the ones who should be singingsoft-rock ballads around the piano in pinkdressing-gowns at Shady Acres. "Have youbeen on the Harbour Bridge at 7.30 pm?"gasps a friend. "It's still peak hour." As JackMundey points out, in 1800 the Governor ofNSW set the working hours for convicts at50 hours a week, and today many people areworking longer hours than convicts in a penalcolony 200 years ago.

Workaholia is not the only Wall Streetexport. Share options and pay forperformance have also spread to Europe andAustralia, further sharpening wealthdisparities. In the past decade, the salaries ofCEOs in the US have jumped 481 per centwhile worker pay has risen only 28 per cent.Overall, American CEOs earn 419 times thepay of the average US worker. In 1976, anAustralian CEO earned three times theaverage wage, today it can be up to 30 timesas much. A survey conducted by theAustralian Financial Review found that twoyears ago, CEO salary packages of Australia'stop 100 companies rose by 22 per cent, to anaverage annual whack of $1.45 million. Ontop of that come share options, with anaverage gross value of $6.15 million.

Everyone is desperate to be a millionaire, asuperstar; a dot.com (still!), a brand name -even the teens. This trivialisation of desirereaches into our innermost being, and that ofour offspring. Marketing prattle isunstoppable, without any sense of its ownabsurdity: "Teens have a keen sense of 'me',"notes an analyst, whether it's "selecting thecolour of their laptop ... or customising thecolour of their cell phones." Being aware ofthe latest fad has come to define what itmeans to be a child.

The Web site iTurf uses "hip street talk tolure its young customers and sell themproducts online," reported The SydneyMorning Herald, "...discussing such topics as

breast size, how to attract sensitive boys andrepel body hair". Its founder plans to expandiTurf to offer teens their first credit cards,their first mortgages, their first chat-roomromances. His goal is clear: "We're going toown this generation." Perhaps he will.

THIN ON THE GROUND ARE THEantiheroes; the mystics and mavericks whoproclaim alternative values and hold incontempt the obsessive accumulation ofwealth - today's Jack Kerouac, Martin LutherKing, Ned Kelly, Timothy Leary, the youngGermaine Greer... Since I can remember,New York has hosted a profusion of wildyoung things, rebels without a super fund, oreven a charge account at Gap, whose missionwas to have fun and shatter theself-confidence of millionaires. They setalight dollar bills on Wall Street, let buzzardsloose in Macy's, raged, plotted and howledagainst the machine. While times a-changeand all that, even so, during a brief visit lastyear; I was taken aback by this fabulous city'scapitulation to materialism and its brazencredo: get as much as you can as fast as youcan.

People pound pavements shouting intomobiles; the skyscrapers double asbillboards, the cafe dockets are emblazonedwith bold reminders, "gratuity not included",each worthy recipient allotted a dotted line:chef, maître d, waitperson, etc, plus tax. Thefixed price is becoming obsolete, incitinghaggling, even over the price of toothpaste.This is fine in Morocco, enfolded into a ritualof mint tea, pipe passing and SydneyGreenstreet, but wears a bit thin in an alcoveat Macy's at rush hour.

Don't imagine you can counter the vibe bycruising the Museum of Modern Art, wherethe "voluntary donation" is compulsory andthe marketing relentless. (In the mid-1990s,gallery space at 120 large museums grew by3 per cent while the amount of space given tomuseum stores jumped by nearly 30 percent.) Even the message of the themed

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exhibition - the idealists - mirrors the moodof the times: marvel at these hoodwinkeddreamers who contemplated a fairer worldand wound up with Stalin. Silly Picasso.

Another light that's failed, at least during myvisit, is environmentalism. The onlyendangered species that sparked concern wasa trench coat by Yves Saint Laurent, costing$U59,250, which had been scooped from thestores. The coat is made from the skin ofrainforest pythons. More than 10 millionpythons have been taken from the wild in thepast 15 years, over half from Indonesia. Apink python jacket from Chanel, with whitechiffon trim and matching skirt, retailing at$U58,455, had also slithered out of theboutiques. "Spokeswomen for four fashion

houses that use python," The New YorkTimes wryly noted, "said they had no ideawhere the skins come from."

Hardly anyone knows or cares whereanything comes from, or where it ends up,because it is only what's on show thatmatters, in the windows, in your face, on thebillboards, at the Oscars ... fame, riches,power; these are the drivers that seem to beshaping the third millennium, whether welike it or not, despite their ravaging of planetand personhood. "Wealth beyond what isnatural is of no more use than water to acontainer that is full," said the Epicureanphilosophers of Ancient Greece, but thedazzling package of popular cultureproclaims the opposite - happiness dependson high consumption. We'll keep onsplurging till the wells run dry.

Soon after the trip to New York, I visitedTonga, one of the poorest nations on earth.Its political system is unjust, resources arefew, and yet I was surprised by joy. Not mineso much, as that of the inhabitants. Laughterechoing through open doorways day andnight, none of it canned (scarce TV),extended families and communal lifestyle(free babysitting), time plentiful, shops few,food fresh, a profusion of local poetry, songand dance, none of it tech-dependent, and thepeople not bent on turning every tourist into ameal ticket. Not yet, anyway.

Sure, most of us would prefer to live inpulsating New York than to emulate theTongans, including the Tongans themselves,probably, and therein lies the dilemma of ourtime. If everyone lived like New Yorkers,what would be left alive? Perhaps the flurryof survivor TV shows is a subliminal playingout of this post-apocalypse vision. Solarpanels and recycling are not much chopagainst melting ice caps, rising seas, gapingozone holes and the mass extinction ofspecies. Even if Kyoto is fully enforced, itwill only reduce atmospheric carbon by 5 percent within 10 years. What is required tostabilise climate is a reduction of between 60and 80 per cent.

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THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE IS NOTnegotiable. And it is not sustainable. The lossof biodiversity, according to Worldwatch'seditorial director Ed Ayres is "arguably themost dangerous of all threats to humansecurity at large, and to the long-termsustainability of civilisation". He cites anAmerican Museum of Natural History surveyof 400 biological scientists which found "alarge majority" believe that during the next30 years, one of every five species alivetoday will become extinct. It is no longerenough to have an ecological notion; we needto create an ecological self. This is a hard callwhen you're wearing a trench coat stitchedfrom pythons.

Sooner or later; the business communitywill need to come to its senses. It will need togo further than putting in skylights andgreening its logos. Can we rely on itsleadership? Corporate titans would muchrather win a battle for market dominance thansave a species from annihilation. But in theend, there may not be a market, unless thewholesale theft of the future is stopped.

What Monsieur Costil foresaw as thephilosophic failure of American movies allthose years ago - action, force, a formula -was more recently echoed in the HarvardBusiness Review by consultant Gary Hamelas he skewered the lack of managerialforesight: "The future is left largelyunexplored and the capacity to act, ratherthan to think or imagine, becomes the solemeasure of leadership." A common trait inthis country, too, both in business andpolitics.

Will globalisation accentuate future-blindness, or can it also trigger acountervailing wave of enlightenment? It willdo both. Thankfully, a growing number ofAmericans share the above concerns,although few of them sit on Capitol Hill. Theglobal Green Party boycott of Exxon Mobiland other predators of the commons is a clueto future strategy, as was the showdown over

proprietary drug rights in AIDS-strickenAfrica. Global tax, global justice, a globalenvironmental agency, are all on the horizon.The concept of sovereignty was alreadytranscended by the United NationsConvention on the Law of the Sea in 1982,which protects the ocean as "the commonheritage of all mankind", in which all rightsin the resources of the area are vested. Bysimilar means, eventually, all arms tradingcan be ended and an agency can beestablished to distribute all surplus food tothe starving. At its deepest level,globalisation is about sharing, just like theInternet, and once understood will incite avalue revolution of such sweep that within100 years the main business of business willno longer be business, and politics will nolonger be about swapping preferences,placating nutters and jailing refugees. Thetotal goal will be planetary restoration -social, economic, ecologic. The question toask ourselves as we journey into the 21stcentury is this: is each of us at heart abusinessman, or is each of us at heart ahuman being? On our answer will hinge thefate of the earth. n

Richard Neville is a director of the FuturesFoundation: rnevilie@ozemail.com.au

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