The "cumulative effects" of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to assess, constitute one key to the impact of growing up in the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests unpreparedness for, and lack of interest in, the world that exists outside the shopping mall.

My university education had been a shallow and superficial enterprise. The central driving forces of the economy I lived in were either ignored or left vague, to the point of meaningless.

But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.

Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.

how can a democratic discourse exist in a corporate owned informational system? Who, for example, possesses freedom of speech in such a society?

Popular dissatisfaction seems to occur only when the shopping or the commercials are interrupted. In such an atmosphere, is there any reason to imagine that saturation shopping could be a source of instability to the U.S. world position?

The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.