<"He argues that what capitalism and fundamentalism have in common is a distaste for democracy. Both, in different ways, lay siege to the nation-state itself--until now the only guarantor of conditions that have permitted democracy to flourish.

Democracy, Barber suggests, may fall victim to a twin-pronged attack: by a global capitalism run rampant, whose essential driving force destroys traditional values as it seeks to maximize profit-taking at virtually any moral or religious or spiritual cost; and by religious, tribal and ethnic fanatics whose various creeds are stamped by intolerance and a rage against the "other."

Barber gives us two scenarios which he fleshes out in considerable detail. The first holds out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large parts of humanity by war and bloodshed, a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture--"a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and mutuality: against technology, against pop culture, against integrated markets; against modernity itself."

The second scenario paints the future in primary colors, a portrait of seemingly irresistible economic, technological and corporate forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize people everywhere with "fast music, fast computers, and fast food--with MTV, Macintosh (computers), and McDonald's, pressing nations into one commercially homogenous theme park: one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment and commerce."



This thesis:

Making equivalent capitalism and fundamentalist terror--

Putting building a McDonalds in a nation on the same level with the deliberate murder of thousands of people--

Discussing corporations and totalitarian terrorists as though they were equal threats to "democracy"--

is so mind-bogglingly obscene that I don't trust myself to comment on it at length at this point.

Please read this.

The rest of the article is largely more of the same, including Wasserman's conclusion, which speaks with contempt about America's being "...Optimistic, pragmatic, impatient, inventive, [and]generous." Of course, I would expect this of Wasserman.

I'll come back to this later, if I can.