Small Towns, Small Minds

excerpted from the book

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

by Greg Palast

Plume Books, 2003, paper

p298
To understand what I mean, let's begin with this. The United States is ugly. A conspiracy of travel writers have sold the image of America the Beautiful: Georgia O'Keeffe sunsets over New Mexico's plateau, the wide-open vistas of the Grand Canyon. But to get there, you must drive through a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald's up to and . leaning over the Canyon wall.

From New Orleans jambalaya, to Harlem ham hocks, to New England crab boil, whatever is unique to an American region or town has been hunted down and herded into a few tourist preserves. The oppressive ubiquity of contrived American monoculture has ingested and eliminated any threat of character. The words of McDonald's late CEO Ray Kroc, ''We cannot trust some people who are nonconformists," have become our national anthem.

p299
The world's three hundred richest people are worth more than the world's poorest three billion.

p299
Dr. Edward Wolff, director of the Income Studies Project at the Jerome Levy Institute, New York, tells me that between 1983 and 1997, 85.5 percent of the vaunted increase in America's wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent. In that time, overall U.S. income rocketed-of which 80 percent of America's families received zero percent. The market's up, but who is the market? According to Wolff, the Gilded One Percent own $2.9 trillion of the nation's stocks and bonds out of a total $3.5 trillion.

Not coincidentally, the rise in the riches of the rich matches quite well with the wealth lost by production workers through the shrinking of their share of the production pie. U.S. workers are producing more per hour (up 17 percent since 1983) while keeping less of it (real wages are down 3.1 percent). So there you have it: The market did not rise on a bubble of fictions but on the rock-hard foundation of the spoils of the class war.

What's going on here? Let's start with computers. Forget Robert Reich's sweet notion that computers can make work more meaningful and worthwhile. The purpose of every industrial revolution, from the steam-powered loom to the assembly line, is to make craft and skills obsolete, and thereby make people interchangeable and cheap. And now, computerization is speeding the industrialization of service work.

p312
The United Kingdom has an Official Secrets Act, libel laws l that effectively privatize censorship of journalism, privacy laws protecting politicians-as do all nations in some form or other, except America. You may be surprised to learn that the mother of our Democracy has no legal freedom of the press, no First Amendment-no Bill of Rights. (Maybe they can borrow ours- we're not using it. And we may have no Official Secrets Act- yet-but we are on the cutting edge of creating an unofficial corporate secrets act.)

And that's why I'm so ornery about fighting for the First Amendment-which our president and bobbing heads in Congress would snatch from us in the name of "security." Just try working in a nation without the right to a free press, and worse, without the will to fight for it. I have. An unholy number of British journalists seem to have fallen in love with their shackles.

p313
Lacking a First Amendment, Britain has become the libel-suit capital of the world. Stories accepted elsewhere draw steep judgments in London. The Guardian papers receive notice of legal action about three times a day-that's one thousand libel notices a year... The Guardian papers operate on a small budget from a not-for-profit foundation.

p314
Truth alone is not a defense in English courts.

p331
[The USA], where nothing can be censored - but where nothing printed is worth censoring.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

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