As the world's most greedy consumers of energy, we still have no coherent, responsible energy policy.
When young men (and women) were expected to grow up into something other than eager, childishly greedy consumers, we looked to movies like "I Vitelloni" and our native variants for possibilities, clues, storm warnings about our future lives.
Indeed, I maintain that high levels of mental illness are essential to Selfish Capitalism, because needy, miserable people make greedy consumers and can be more easily suckered into perfectionist, competitive workaholism.
Rising output in North America threatens to offset imports to the United States, the world's greediest oil consumer and still Saudi Arabia's most reliable customer.
The trick of the novel, its central comic turn, is to make Beard, the greedy, selfish uber-consumer, an accidental expert on anthropogenic climate change.
In interviews, the company and the lawyers suing it seek to frame the conflict in stark terms: devious lawyers with spurious claims piling on a valuable manufacturer, or a greedy company hurting consumers by refusing to fix a defective product.
Convert countries have forgotten, or are not aware, that turbo-capitalism in the United States is embedded in a distinctive legal system and in Calvinism.America's legal system, with its "nasty, greedy" lawyers, lets consumers, suppliers and lesser competitors, as well as government agencies, use the law to contain the overpowering strength of big business.
And that's where the suffering begins.It is a seductive argument: our misery is all the fault of greedy corporations squeezing innocent consumers.
Mr Davis's reply was to waffle using lots of populist words, refusing to pass rate-increases on to consumers, blaming greedy out-of-state suppliers and calling for price caps in the national wholesale electricity market.
Their answer was to call the 32X a "transitional device" between the Genesis and the Saturn, to which Bayless describes of the strategy, "[f]rankly, it just made us look greedy and dumb to consumers".
