"If someone eats ten times as much food as they need, we consider them a glutton, and treat them with utmost contempt. However, if someone's lusts for material goods are equally out of control, we admire them. We celebrate waste and conspicuous consumption."

Search keywords : Scream 3 Scream3 .

"Greed is not about wanting to make money.
All of us want to do that, and companies have to.
In contrast, greed is about being unable to think of anything else."

"The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil of this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination. It is out of their failure to put themselves on trial that their evil arises. They are, in my experience remarkably greedy people. ...

A predominant characteristic of the behavior that I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. ...

Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. The evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. ... Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others, they should be destroying the sickness within themselves."

pages 72, 73, 74

"... it must be obvious to the finance ministers who attend the annual meetings of the IMF/World Bank that their institutions are sick. Those inside the Washington, D.C., headquarters can't feel so healthy after the year that passed. It was a year when corporations that they nurtured and nourished, like Enron, collapsed with little warning and less grace. When countries that had long swallowed their prescriptions, like Argentina, found themselves suffering from nauseous economies and rashes of popular uprising. And when a critic they cut from their innards like a malignant growth, Joseph Stiglitz (some speeches and essays here), walked off with a Nobel Prize.

If they care to listen to the protests, the ministers will hear at least one diagnosis that explains their various ailments: "Infectious greed". ...

Activist Maude Barlow, the chairperson of The Council of Canadians, reminds us that Bush has rarely missed an opportunity to use the war on terror to advance his trade agenda. She quotes the President from the announcement of his Administration's National Security Policy last week: 'There is a single sustainable model for national success', Bush said, 'Freedom, Democracy, and Free Enterprise'.

For the people of the United States, this constitutes a shameless politicization of our fear. When Bush stares down "the enemy," he leaves no room for a vision of freedom based on open debate and democratic self-determination. Rather, he pledges to wield the military might at his command to enforce this "single model" — one where "free markets" and "free trade" rule.

You are either with us or against us, he says."

"It made a net profit of $8.4bn (£4.7bn) between January and March, up from $7.86bn a year ago.

But Exxon shares fell by over 1% in early trading because analysts had predicted a profit of over $9bn.

In January Exxon reported an annual profit of $36bn, the highest in US corporate history."

"An iPod and the right phone are now essential trappings of youth -- not just because they let you talk or listen to music at your convenience, but because of what they say about you. Once we were known by what we produced (Literally: Smith, Baker, Shoemaker, Carpenter). Now we judge ourselves and others by what we and they consume. The advertisers know this; that's why they ask: 'What does your mobile say about you?' Welcome to the consumer society and the world of the turbo-consumer. It's a world driven by competition for consumer goods and paid-for experiences, of hi-tech and high-end shopping signals that have become the means by which we keep score with each other.

As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman points out, to be a successful consumer now defines what it is to be "normal". Therefore to be "abnormal" is to be a failed consumer. The lot of the failed consumer is miserable. This new poor may be better off in absolute terms than the poor of previous generations, but in the world of the turbo-consumer what you have means nothing -- it's what others have and therefore what we must have next that counts. On these terms the new poor are falling far behind in an age when keeping up is everything. (Author Lawson casts this in intra-societal terms, but of course we can also stop to consider the envy that the global "haves" inspire in the global "have-nots"...)

The failed consumer suffers not just from exclusion from normal society but isolation. The poor of the past had each other in a community of poverty. Misery could be shared and countered through class solidarity and the hope of a different life. The new poor lick their wounds alone in their council flats, with nowhere to hide from the messages on billboards and TV that constantly remind them of their social failure. The new poor, without the right labels and brands, are not just excluded but invisible.

The final ignominy of today's poor is that they don't want to overthrow the rich to create a new order, they just want to be like them. So they are denied even the satisfaction of anyone to hate -- just B-list celebrities to envy and copy.

So if you want the causes of crime, then look no further than the impulse of the poor to belong and be normal. So strong is this urge that the failed consumer will lie, cheat and steal to "earn" the trappings of success. In the world of the "me generation", people become calculating rather than law-abiding in their overwhelming desire to be normal. This is crime driven by the rampant egoism of turbo-consumerism, where enough is never enough. And precisely because of its competitive nature, consumer-driven crime cannot be switched off through tougher laws. ...

Why should failed consumers play by the rules when no one at the top seems to -- when social mobility is declining; when the government refuses to implement vocational training reforms for fear of a Daily Mail backlash over A-levels (education evaluation tests); when more thick (U.S.: "stupid") middle-class children fill our universities; and when school league tables (government evaluations of school performance ) mean "problem kids" won't be tolerated?

New Labour refuses to change the rules of the market state and consumer society, and instead attempts another crackdown on the symptoms through Asbos (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders -- court orders prohibiting specific individuals from engaging in certain behaviors found anti-social or disruptive to the peace.) (Wow; I wasn't familar with these -- looks like the government is really intruding into civil society here. See "Nanny State") and control orders. Just like Thatcherism, New Labour relies on a strong state to police a free market. (Well, the State has to be strong enough to police the free market. If your bazaar is troubled by theft, feuds, or riots, the market's going to collapse, and people are going to have to dig their own coal and forge their own shovels, or do without.) The prime minister extols his respect agenda without realising that the architect of the term, the sociologist Richard Sennett, was talking about the respect the powerful give to the powerless. So Tony Blair tries to turn back the tide of crime against a rampant consumer culture of new gadgets that are designed, advertised, sold and bought to prove our normality over and over again. Nine years, 50 law bills and more than 700 new offences later, being even tougher on crime isn't going to work.

Of course, it is always wrong to mug or steal -- but unless, as a society, we are prepared to understand why crime happens then, in the words of the criminologist Professor Ian Loader, 'we are using a sticking plaster (U.S.: "band-aid") to fix a broken leg"'. You cannot build a tolerant society on the basis of zero tolerance. ...

When it is the dominance of the consumer economy that is driving so much crime, easy answers aren't close to hand. We need a different conception of the good life, in which time, relationships and care take precedence over consumerism. Next there is a political alliance to be created between the post-material, happiness-seeking middle classes, who want more time, and this new poor, who have all the time in the world but none of the money. This is what needs rebalancing: not the criminal justice system, but the wealth and riches of the nation.

The problem of not belonging, of being anxious and insecure, afflicts us all. It's just more sharply focused for those at the bottom of the heap. The social theorist Roberto Unger says: 'Almost everyone feels abandoned. Almost everyone believes they are an outsider, looking in through the window at the party going on inside.' "

"Why can't people who seem to have so much simply be satisfied with what they have, without feeling the need to risk breaking the law to get even more?"