Synopsis

traversing the country from the glitz of •Las Vegas• to the homes of every day men and women, American Dream documents the journey of one man as he tries to make sense of a world that seems to have lost its mind.

Including a variety of engaging interviews with celebrities, luminaries and industry leaders such as Danny Glover, Howard Zinn, Vicki Robin, Ed Begley Jr., Jean Kilbourne , Rickson GRACIE, Satish Kumar and others, American Dream helps shed light on our consumer culture, its causes and effects. With a combination of humor and insight, we discover an America we never knew we were a part of.

Beginning with a look at the dream of a material utopia most of us have grown up believing in, we move on to an glimpse of our history as a species and as a country to help understand some of our hard-wired behavior. We look at the development of the advertising industry from a basic service that used to tell us what was simply available on the market, to a over 450 billion dollar a year industry of perception management. We ask ourselves what these developments say about our loss of sense of purpose as a society and what we can do as individuals to re-align our lives with our true values.

It is proposed, that by re-inventing consumerism, we can re-claim our fundamental freedom to choose the world in which we live. By paying close attention to our activity as the consumers that drive industry, as the labor force that keeps businesses alive and as the investors that support these enterprises, we are able to transform the world in which we live, both locally and globally.