”People often evoke “corrosive individualism” and also consumerist “materialism” as a way of accounting for the destructiveness of the new globalization process. But I think these moralizing concepts are inadequate to the task, and do not sufficiently identify the destructive forces that are North American in origin and result from the unchallenged primacy of the United States today and thus the “American way of life” and American mass media culture. This is consumerism as such, the very linchpin of our economic system, and also the mode of daily life in which all our mass culture and entertainment industries train us ceaselessly day after day, in an image and media barrage quite unparalleled in history. Since the discrediting of socialism by the collapse of Russian communism, only religious fundamentalism has seemed to offer an alternative way of life — let us not, heaven help us, call it a lifestyle — to American consumerism.” (Frederic Jameson, Globalization as Philosophical Issue, p.65 in Jameson, Fredric, and Masao Miyoshi. The Cultures of Globalization. Duke University Press, 1998.).