Caught this film while surfing the channels last night, very eye catching indeed. If you get a chance, rent it or look for it to be shown again. I guarantee you it will awaken you to what is going on with the world consumer wise and with this global economy stuff.
What I found interesting?
Since 1950, America has consumed more energy and products than ALL of civilization before!
Waste? Too many details to go into, you gotta see the film. One instance? In 1 year in America, enough aluminum cans (loved how they focused on beer cans) go to landfills instead of recycling (regardless of the hype, recycling in America is MINIMAL at best), all those wasted aluminum cans are enough to build 6 THOUSAND DC-10s!
The American consumer consumes 5 times more than a Mexican, 10 times more than a Chinese, 30 times more than a person from India. All that is changing now as China and Mexico and India are getting more affluent and are able to buy new cars, consumer products, etc... If every Chinese family had two cars RIGHT NOW, you would really see an oil crisis. As it stands now, estimates with the Indian and Chinese population and rise in consumerism that our grandkids may very well see the end of the petroleum industry. I say why wait? Instead of giving the Iraqis all our money, let's buy big gas guzzling SUVs and cars with big block V-8s and GIVE them to India and China, let's suck up the fossil fuel companies now, not later! America will then have no choice but to switch to hybrid and fuel cell technology! Hehehehehehehe.
In all seriousness though, there is a growing movement in America to cut the BS and get back on the right track. One thing I like about Mexico vs the U.S.A. No frigging billboards telling me that I need to buy this or use that in order to be somebody.
If you enter Affluenza in your search engine, you can find many highlights.
BTW, our media is not controlled, we have free press? The groups involved during the filming were willing to pay market rates for the media to carry their commercials, not controversial or bad or anything, just sending out a message, it did not matter though, no major network wanted to carry them.
Seems President Carter was the only President concerned about waste and consumerism and the ecology.
They also had an interesting graph comparison of GDP vs GDI
http://www.undp.org/hdr2000/english/FAQs.html For those of you that have been other places, seen other things, been around the world, you know what I am talking about. Maybe it would behoove us to be like Germany and make recycling and separation of trash articles Mandatory or face stiff fines and penalties.
How much steel sits rusting in our junkyards or landfills? God only knows that one I guess. We cannot compete in world steel even when we go to third world countries and mine it there? Maybe if we recycled all the frigging steel laying around the U.S. rotting away we could still pay a good American wage AND compete in the world markets.