In this cogently written article, Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation raise the issue of why the "elephant in the room" of corporate consolidation is not being debated within public discourse. Although it's not obvious when you're shopping at Bloomingdale's that you're actually shopping at Macy's, which now owns Bloomingale's, or that when choosing between milk brands you're actually only choosing between labels, I don't think this is a sufficient explanation for why consolidation has not been more discussed in the news or why the issue of corporate consolidation is not top of mind for the American public. I think the next step for collective inquiry is to ask why we have come to adopt an ideology that does not perceive this obvious undermining of the free market as problematic.
The article points out that in the past new technology has increased jobs, and uses this point to refute the relevance of technology to job loss. While I'm not sure if it's accurate to say that new technology has historically increased jobs, setting this point aside, I do feel that the article narrowly perceives technology only as a sort of tool that impacts efficiency. Whereas technology can also be perceived as having a programmatic effect on human consciousness. For example, the ability to read silently rose with the technology of the printing press, and industrialization changed our perception of time. Once we perceive technology as potentially having a programmatic quality, we can pose the question of how new technology may be at the root of ideological change toward a social Darwinist belief that the "elephant in the room" deserves its social position of invisible domination.
Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine? - Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman
Whatever Happened to Free Speech?
It's hard for me to understand the argument against net neutrality regulation. It seems so obvious that restrictions on communication impinge on the "free speech" our democracy was based on. The media corporations that control access to the internet have stated clearly that they intend to control traffic online, allowing some communication to move faster based on how much one is paying. So many on the Republican side don't seem to appreciate that if money allows one voice to be heard (and causes another to be squelched), there is no freedom of speech in any practical sense in spite of us all having the ability to speak. This is, of course, the same problem we're dealing with due to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The fact that the FCC has not taken strong and bold actions to protect the vast majority of "the people" from corporate domination online is a symbolic of where we are really at in the the United States.
Chris Hedges says it best quoting Hannah Arendt:
“For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism. “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible, refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous. ... The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside non-totalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity. ...”
How Democracy Dies: Lessons From a Master
The time for compromise has passed on net neutrality
Permalink