100 WAYS AMERICA IS SCREWING THE WORLD
by John Tirman with forward by Howard Zinn
Harper Perennial New York2006
Reviewer: Ken Setter

Reading this book is an ideal way to be mindful of America’s heavy-footed role in the world, for those who have travelled along the path of recognition it is an easy, quick and handy reference to things half forgotten.

Like any enormously powerful nation, the United States has thrown its weight around in countless ways; its culture and products increasingly dominate culture and consumer choices around the world, while at home, Americans are fed a diet of saccharine self-love. The author says that some will no doubt say this book is ‘an anti-American rant, the whine of the left, and other potshots. Consider for a moment another possibility. Think of this as simply truth telling inside a family that needs to hear it, tough lover for the twenty-first’s century’.

If you want to know how America stuffs up ‘Christmas’, easy, that’s number 86 of the 100. This book brings a comprehensive run down on American consumerism and its manipulation of Christmas. As a modern economic engine Christmas is very much an American invention, with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer staring as a commercial myth launched by Montgomery Ward in 1939, by the 1990’s Christmas was the mainstay of the American economy, representing about one-quarter of all retail sales. Even Thanksgiving, established by Abe Lincoln, was moved back by Franklin D. Roosevelt to ensure a longer shopping season. Christmas is nice, but after weeks of hearing Jingle Bells and the Little Drummer Boy, even my patience wears a little thin.

‘Making history’ coming in at number 75. Reminding us of Ronald Reagan 1985 speech in Bitberg, Germany at the graveyard filled with Nazi officers who carried out the Holocaust and why the conservatives want to forget it. Recent history can be so embarrassing. Hence while the U.S. military bulldozers were busy burring thousands of Iraqi soldiers alive in Desert Strom (1991 Gulf War One) the spin-doctors were hectically plastering over the truth, changing history. In a consumer society one quickly learns to forget the ‘duds’ and move on.

‘America the victim’ has a nice touch on 52. Many in America persist in think the Vietnam war can still be described as a betrayal ---‘fighting with one hand tied behind our back’, yet more than two million US troops were deployed, more bombs dropped than during the Second World War, more than a million Vietnamese killed, yet they say it was a betrayal. They have also forgotten that the Korean War ended not with victory but by an Armistice, that America quickly withdrew from Somalia and Lebanon when they started taking losses and that America is currently losing the war in Iraq.

‘Mel Gibson’ gets a mention he’s 64 on the 100 ways America is screwing up the World. Mel Gibson’s violence and blood-soaked the message is clear, we are the most Christian of nations, proclaim that our messiah’s life and meaning is most vividly understood as one of violence. The movie made $700 million worldwide in the first five months. That’s Gibson’s contribution to America’s largest export, violence.

Evil comes in many packages. It can pilot airplanes into skyscrapers, commit genocide against innocent peoples, and produce mass delusions of righteousness. But sometimes evil appears in simple and stark forms. Over decades American corporations have been exporting chemicals and other products proven to be hazardous or poisonous, to people in the third world. Number four on the list of 100 ways America is stuffing up the world. Dumping toxic chemical on innocent people, now that’s really evil folk.

With the talk turning to free trade agreements it is timely to look at America’s agribusiness and its $US20 billion a year subsidy to corn growers alone, it is much more in total, yet corn syrup is responsible for a pandemic of obesity and rising rates of diabetes since it invention in 1970. Even Paul Newman’s lemonade has the high-fructose corn syrup sweetener. Subsidies are not restricted to corn growers; cotton growers earn $US280 billion a year from subsidies. ‘According to a World Bank study agricultural subsidies cost the developing world $US350 billion annually. Official development aid---foreign assistance---amounts to only one-seventh of the total or $US50 billion. Keep in mind that some 800 million people worldwide live on the brink of starvation. One would think that subsidized grains might help that situation, but the system of production, sales, transport, and its effects on local agriculture are so distorted that it does not really address food security.’

But should these remarks sound trite, they are not meant to be, this is a serious book for a popular readership, how else are they going to know this stuff.

John Tirman is executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, the author of nine books and regular feature writer for The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Wall Street Journal and many more. Howard Zinn has written a worthy introduction.

The last word must go to the English conservative philosopher Edmund Burke, “to make us love our country,” he says, “our country ought to be lovely.” That is something the spin-doctors have yet to learn.