Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

One growing threat to the stability of the U.S. economy, and therefore to its capability to continue to direct the global order, paradoxically emerges from its success in establishing capitalism around the world.

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

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.

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.

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.