"But," wrote William Blacker, in the May 2002, Ecologist magazine, "[while in Romania] I have had to bear witness to a process of change which should make those of us who live in the West ashamed of our culture. Ours is a culture which obliterates all others with which it comes into contact."
    That's Sooooooooo True. Have you noticed it? What is happening to the world??? I think that we Westerners have an invisible aura or something like nettles, where we sting whatever we come in contact with and infect them. It's all so much like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Maybe we give off spores that our unsuspecting victims inhale. Maybe there's some truth to those Dracula movies after all. Personally I think it definitely has to do with monsters from outer space.
    Evidently so do the people at the Ecologist because, while they seem to identify the problem so well all the time, they never get to looking for the cause.
    "For a long time now," says Blacker, "we have watched small communities all over the world-- where people have lived happy harmless lives -- being destroyed by western consumerism's desire for growth. Primitive peoples have been forced to become consumers. Barely a hand has been lifted to save them. We are destroying the very things which most of us would like to reintroduce into owr own lives: not just the sense of community, but the lack of litter, the clean rivers, and food processed without chemicals."

My goodness! Whatever can be the cause???? Are we giving off Consumerism Spores???
    Is it really so mysterious? Or could it possibly be that the Ecologist and all the other "save-the-earth" groups, like Friends of the Earth, War On Want, and International Forum on Globalization, have found themselves a nice profitable niche market and digging too deep for real solutions may disturb their bottom line? After all, if all the ills of the world were cured wouldn't they be out of a job?

Other Viewpoints . . .

On 20 May 2002, Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., of the National Journal, wrote: "Be it weapons or widgets, rockets or refrigerators, the United States prevailed in war and peace because it could produce the most of the latest stuff. It was global domination through mass production."
    Well! There you go. Americanization is inevitable because Americans are just naturally great, and greatness cannot be contained. Its wonderfulness simply cannot be hemmed in by national borders.  So that's why Nixon offered $10 million to CIA director Richard Helms, to bribe the Chilean Congress to vote against Allende's presidential confirmation. Just spreading more of that natural American wonderful goodness around the world.

Here is what actually causes Americanization: Money creation. Creating money by wishing it into existence. It's really simple, anybody can understand it, and there's nothing particularly new here. But first let me preface this explanation with something most people are not clear about.
    Money, the money we use every day, is lent into existance -- that's where it comes from. When you buy a house, the bank creates (it does not lend, it creates) money and gives it to the seller. When the seller spends that money it starts circulating. Then as you collect those circulating dollars, you give them to the bank to pay off your mortgage. The bank then takes your money and strikes it off their books, -- they extinguish that money. That's where all our money, whether it be government spending or bank creation, comes from: loans.
    If there is the slightest doubt here, the confirmation can be found at Edward Flaherty's website: "How do banks create money" Flaherty is a professor of economics and stalwart spokesman for the Federal Reserve System. If he admits it, then it's true.  His home page is at: http://home.earthlink.net/~flahertyhsd/
 
 

Cause Number One

You can verify this with your own experience -- this is not rocket science. (Appologies if you have already seen this in the Greco book review. It's my off-the-shelf explanation, but it's important)
    Look at it this way: suppose you are a plumber. You can earn $15 an hour in Akron, Ohio, or $35 an hour in New York City . Now you are thinking about the cost of living, right?; it costs more to live in NYC so the pay is higher. Very perceptive. But consider this. In Akron, if you go to the bank, the bankers will tell you your  "creditworthiness" is based on a $30,000 earning potential and in New York your "creditworthiness" is based on a $70,000 earning potential.
    You already understand that money in today's modern world is created by credit. Loans. Our money, 95 percent of it, is lent into existence. But you, in your dual Akron/NYC personality above, are eligible to create two different amounts of money simply by changing your address and nothing else. This right here explains why city people will always have the money to colonize rural areas  -- they have the money; they create it.  The higher the cost of living is, the more money is created for the same amount of effort.
    Yes, it's that simple. Money today is created, not according to the value of a service or commodity per se, but according to the address of the creator. People who live in big economies create more money than those in small economies precicely because of the difference in the cost of living.

What this means is that pensions and savings are also increased according to address. The plumber who saves 5 percent in Akron will save twice the dollar amount in New York. Pensions, being a function of salary, are also increased. All of these things have an effect in the colonization of less affluent areas by "rich" metropolitan areas.
     The assumption is that all of the money created in New York stays in New York and that is simply not true -- people save, and worse, they invest and they retire to the suburbs... or Belize. Unequal (cheap) money is created and saved in cities, and permitted to flow across borders into "poor" areas where it buys expensive real goods. Have you ever heard of anyone from Akron retiring to NYC? No. People retire in a wave-like fashion; From NYC to the suburbs; from Akron to the countryside; from the countryside to Belize; from Belize to the Himalayas. Always moving to a place where "it's cheaper" or more accurately, where their cheaply created money is worth more.
     So this is why a dinner in the Himalayas costs 25 cents and it's why Hyatt and Planet Hollywood will inevitably colonize places like Atlantic City, Miami and Key West... and Mozambique: it's not because they are particularly industrious or independently wealthy, it's because they have a corner on the money creation business.
    If money were created according to the ability to carry 200 pounds up the side of a cliff, the Sherpas would have owned New York City years ago.
 

I suppose if I dug up the figures I could make a stronger case, but that's part of my point: it doesn't require data and statistics, only casual observation. New York money has systematically and methodically destroyed first, Coney Island, then Miami Beach, then Atlantic City, then Key West as well as the Bahamas and now US money is taking over Belize, South America and ... well, the rest of the world. In my lifetime I have watched the US cities grow and collapse. When I lived in Atlantic City in 1971-6, if you took the time to get off the beach, the city looked like a bombed-out war zone - hundreds of acres of houses for sale for back taxes. Even half the hotels on the Boardwalk were boarded up.
    When I was in Seattle 1959-70 it was not unusual to see billboards in Oregon and Washington State that said, for example, "Oregon... a nice place to visit, but you DON'T want to live here." Obviously they already understood what I am talking about: the hazards of cheap foreign money and the problems of 'economic growth' to the extent that people get taxed out of the houses they had lived in for 3 generations. Nowdays all that has changed. People don't buy houses to live in, they buy them as an investment... a business deal.
 
 

Cause Number Two (debt virus)

First, you already understand that Money is lent into existance. But there is a problem here. The money created demands that interest be paid, and that interest payment is not created by the bankers. If you 'borrow' $100,000 from a bank for 20 years your total payments to the bank will be close to $300,000. So where does the extra $200,000 come from? The answer that today's bankers decided on is: lend more money. Alternately, let government spend money into existence and thirdly bankruptcies will take some of the pressure off.
    The net result is that there is a continual spiral of ever increasing loans and unpayable debt. I say unpayable, because if you stop to think about it, when money is lent into existence... if you pay off the loan it takes the money out of circulation. Paying off the US national debt would reduce the money supply and put the US in a massive recession. People who propose various means of payng off the debt are either ignorant or liars. And the little old ladies who send in their $100 earmarked for debt payment are being taken for a big ride.

This debt spiral is nothing new, Marx saw it 150 years ago, but as Edvard Lutwak (author of Turbo Capitalism) says, "Marx saw it as a downward spiral-- in fact, it's an upward spiral." Of course all this spiraling may be a matter of perspective. If you are a Himalayan and people are buying houses that took centuries to build, with money it took only weeks to earn, the spiral may look like a downward spiral.
     Growth Figures: that's what the "economists" are always talking about when you hear them on the news. They talk about growth because without growth, the system collapses. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, produces a quarterly forcast "outlook for growth" at:
http://www.phil.frb.org/files/spf/survq202.html
    Much was said by Milton Friedman about the "natural" money system, yet this is an inconmprehensibly UN-natural system. It's like a bicycle: if you stop, it falls over. But the forced growth -- the perpetual Americanization -- makes it pretty much like a steam roller.
    William Hummel tries to debunk this spiral thing in an article, "The Interest Time-bomb".
http://wfhummel.cnchost.com/timebomb.html
(Flaherty has a similar article called the "Debt Virus")
http://members.home.com/flaherty15/index.htm
    Hummel says not to sweat the small stuff: growth figures fix the problem. That is,- what many people see as The Big Problem (mandatory perpetual growth), he says is The Cure.
    Again, what works for the economists in their books may not be what the people in undeveloped areas see. The Himalayan may look at the bankers growth and see only colonization and imperialism.

Adding 1 + 2

Now, if you add #1 and #2 above, to the fact that with today's credit-money systems size is everything, then Americanization is unavoidable simply because of the size of the US economy.
    Economic systems are not like playing checkers. A 98 pound weakling can beat Hulk Hogan at checkers-- it's possible. But a small economy like Chili, Romania or Uzbekistan cannot possibly win this economic game. In this economics game, size is everything. It's like the battle of the steam-rollers: the big one wins Every Time; the small one gets squashed Every Time. So, unless something changes in the way money is created sometime soon, it's McDonald's and Starbucks on every block for all the world, like it or not.
 

Thoughts?

Go to:
Walt's Page
Synergy Essays
Synergy Home