Message-ID: <970603073146_741910654@emout11.mail.aol.com> Date: Tue, 3 Jun 1997 07:31:47 -0400 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM Subject: Re: average American's perception of the US role in the 1st To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Jay,I wrote
<< >If enough people in Hawaii had wanted to organize to stop the spread of >tourism they could have do, Jay.>>
You replied at length, saying among other things:
<< They can't for at least five reasons (two of which you mentioned).
#1 Your point about bribes. In a private money based political system, those who are not influenced by money, don't get elected.
#2. Your point about corporate propaganda. No culture has been able to withstand seductive corporate images. Ultimately, the mass media defines the values of its viewers. >>
I hope we're able to relate all of these exchanges to technology transfer and development: can we make the connections?
Briefly: it is easy to find evidence in the history of all democratic capitalistic countries that your points about the impossibility of the "people" defeating the "plutocrats" are false.
If you were right there would be no unions; children would still be working in dangerous factories; the 60-hour work week would be common; there would be no social security or other forms of social service; there would be no minimum wage. . .and on and on, a long list of ordinary, unspectacular common folk defeating the "interests."
I remind you that it wasn't the rapacious corporations and the war profiteers that shortened the Vietnam war and drove Lyndon Johnson from office; and Nixon's power and corporate connections didn't help him in the end.
It's possible that exact reverse of your charges are also true: it's become impossible to govern because the media focus so much microscopic attention on the sec lives and private dealings of our office holders that they spend more time in court than governing, and are driven out of office. In the old days, power and money could do anything without fear of exposure: today the powerful can't have a private deal for a couple of million or break into Watergate or have a date in a motel without the media blowing the whistle.
Schiller, of course, like Parenti teaches that the mass media have drugged the poulace into compliance with media fantasies, and there is much truth to the position. But you have resisted, haven't you, Jay? And all of your friends don't endlessly shop and consume, so it's possible to resist media allure.
How does this issue relate to development and technology transfer?
I suspect that the high level generalizations about corporations and media nd consumer culture don't get us very far.
Is it possible to raise questions of action regarding , say, technology transfer in 1997 in this world as it now exists, global economy and all, media hype and all, consumer culture and all, that would allow us to try to move some technology from where it is now to those who want and need it?
Many of us need opportunitiews to vent our anger at capitalism and the unjust distribution of wealth and corporations who buy a culture and the limitations of the Western materialist worldview, but it seems to me that turning this forum into a pulpit for that kind of preaching doesn't transfer any technology to, say, Newark or Bangladesh or South LA or the poverty places of Hawaii.
Or really do much to level the playing field between the North and the South and the haves of technology and the have nots who need it.
Unless we're saying that everyone but us is so corrupt that development and technology transfer are impossible.
Steve Eskow