Photos of cyclists in Holland... or maybe Denmark? Lost the link...

Jay Beattie wrote:
[...]
By the way, advertising these days is far more truthful than in my
youth -- when cigarettes were wholesome and we all danced around the
campfire drinking Thunderbird.[...]

Hey, I use Thunderbird to read and post to Usenet!

--
Tom Sherman - Holstein-Friesland Bovinia
The weather is here, wish you were beautiful

Jay Beattie wrote:

The debate over creation & distribution of wealth is no doubt as old as
civilization. I'm not so much interested in converting others to my
beliefs as trying to raise awareness (including my own) that the debate
has been silenced.

How has any debate been silenced? Every Bozo in the world has a
computer and is free (and does) post/blog/webcast about everything and
anything. This post is a perfect example.-- Jay Beattie.

While I agree that the Internet is becoming an important tool for the
propagation/debate of ideas, it is really the only major countervailing
development to the overall trend of media consolidation and control.

The most glaring example of the narrowing of public discourse is the
(self-admitted) almost complete failure of the press to
investigate/report the claims/issues that led up to the US invasion of
Iraq. Dan Rather's blubbering mea culpa is rather cold comfort.

The last decade has brought important changes involving deregulation
(financial, telecommunications) and "globalization" of the economy
(NAFTA, GATT) which slid in on greased rails with little scrutiny and/or
debate. The last presidential election was a bit of a farce, given the
almost complete lack of substantive debate (Iraq, universal health care,
campaign/lobby reform, tax reform), and this one is shaping up
similarly. The press is MIA. There is a growing gap between what the
majority seems to want (out of Iraq, universal health care) and what we
get. The press seems oblivious.

When I was a kid (50's), almost all of the civic events I attended were
military (parades, air shows) or corporate (auto shows, world fairs). My
schools had presentations from Dow Chemical, GE and IBM. These same
corporate sponsors wrote the jingles we lived by: "GE, brings good
things to life!", "BASF -- We don't make things, we make things better!"
and, of course "Better living through Chemistry". There was the rare
"Look for the union label", but it was hardly balanced. The AFL-CIO or
Teamsters never came to my school.

The Fortune 500 now controls something like 60+% of the GDP. What's more
important is that recent "globalization" has leveraged that control
enormously. These companies have moved outside the control of any
government. The political process is increasingly being funded almost
exclusively by corporate interests and most major government posts are
filled and vacated via a "revolving door" arrangement. We are engaged in
a protracted war, motivated by financial interests, where most logistics
and now even a significant fraction of the armed forces, are provided by
(for profit) corporations. This is new territory, both by precedent and
degree.

Government policies have, in the past decade or so, economically favored
the corporate and social elite. Profits have grown disproportionate to
income and overall growth, productivity gains are not being invested or
spent. This frees up a great deal of surplus capital to chase
speculation, simultaneously, the restrictions to the flow of capital
between markets have been reduced or eliminated. If any government tries
to control things, the money moves elsewhere. The last time this
happened, we got the Great Depression.

Look at China (the 800lb gorilla in the room). Foreign investment has
enabled enormous productivity gains and massive profits. What to do with
all that money? The Chinese government is afraid to give it out to the
populace, fearing both runaway inflation and loss of social control, so
it parks the money in (mostly) US financial markets, arbitrarily
enforcing a 50% "savings" rate on its workers. All that money is
creating a huge problem. An economic "sneeze" from China could tumble
the world markets. It sounds contradictory, but surplus capital is a big
danger.

Perhaps an oversimplification, but if you think about the old agrarian
feudal systems built on noble land owners and tenant farmers, inevitably
surplus wealth retained by the nobility was used for war. Idle capital
tempts all sorts of mischief. Why should a US multinational invest in
"domestic" (whatever that means today) production when much greater rate
of returns can be had in China (what % of world's concrete output is
currently going to China?).

It took centuries for the American labor movement to wrest concessions
from US corporations and get the playing field somewhat level. That
antagonistic process certainly didn't impoverish our society or stifle
growth, it stabilized the economy and brought record prosperity. It also
set the stage for most of the progressive social improvements: women's
rights, environmental protection, occupational health & safety, etc. and
almost gave us universal health care. In one swoop, we have freed the
financial institutions from those hard-won compromises and enabled them
to invest their (originally our) surplus capital in a social framework
that has none of those progressive features.

I'm not as bleak as Tom. I feel that there is much more awareness about
these issues than there was in decades past. Despite conflicts over some
dwindling resources and looming environmental issues, I am confident
that the enormous productivity gains wrought by technology will
eventually "lift all boats". All the same, I fear the hegemony of
corporate interests and the lack of checks and balances will encourage a
lot of regressive behavior and unnecessary human suffering during the
transition. Too much money in the hands of very narrow interests is a
recipe for disaster. I'd agree with Abraham Lincoln, but observe that a
lot of corporate money is dedicated to "fooling most of the people all
of the time".

We've had a couple of decades now to tally the consequences of
Hayek-style laissez-faire capitalism. We're living the supply side,
trickle down dream of Reagan and Thatcher. We've had an S&L crash, a dot
com crash, now a mortgage crash, and various other speculation driven
misadventures. We're deeper in debt than ever, we have infrastructure
and entitlement liabilities and greater disparities in both wealth and
income. Despite continuing robust gains in productivity across the board
for decades, we work more for relatively static wages. Social safety
nets have been scrapped and the peace dividend from the end of the cold
war has all been spent and then some. My contention is that none of the
current level of tolerance for this rather obscene state of affairs
would exist without the continual manipulation of the populace by those
who spend billions annually to do so. I could not explain it any other way.