1st Edition
The Business of America How Consumers Have Replaced Citizens and How We Can Reverse the Trend
When President Bush promoted shopping as a patriotic duty, the American culture of consumption hit a new low. But a quiet revolution is growing in the developing world and in a new generation of Americans, fighting the advance of the shopping malls and the desolation they leave behind. Written by one of the most insightful critics of American commercialism, The Business of America probes the forces that have transformed citizens into consumers eager to take as much as they can from the planet. From on-line shopping to spectator sports to the cash-and-carry ethos of political campaigns, Saul Landau decodes the subtle ways in which advertising images tell us to correct our inadequacies with more things: SUVs, credit cards, air conditioning, video games. The winds of change are blowing, Landau shows, from resurgent student protests for underpaid janitors to the Group of 21, the developing countries that stopped the World Trade Organization dead in its tracks in 2003. Eschewing nostalgia for a simpler time--a less-interconnected world that can never return-The Business of America shows how we as citizens can regain our identities, stripping away the plastic overlay of consumerism.
Biography
Saul Landau, an internationally-known scholar, author, commentator, and filmmaker, is the Director of Digital Media Programs and International Outreach at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He has made 40 films, including the recent Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard Place. He received the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, the George Polk Award for Investigative Reporting, and the First Amendment Award, as well as an Emmy for Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang. He has written fourteen books including his most recent, The Pre-emptive Empire: A Guide to Bush's Kingdom, and received an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Assassination on Embassy Row, a report on the murder of Orlando Letelier. He is currently working on a detective novel.
"The credit card has gradually replaced the voter registration card as a key symbol of civic involvement. Saul Landau takes a fresh and valuable look at how and why -- and what we can do about it. Against the mass-media grain, this book refutes the inevitability of corporate consciousness. Readers will find in Landau's writing an incisive analytical approach combined with an uplifting spirit
." -- Norman Solomon, Syndicated columnist and Author, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media
"Papers critically examine the vision of President George W. Bush; the national security culture; media in the twenty-first century; some environmental issues; and the Iraqu conundrum." -- Journal of Economic Literature
