Mike Spencer wrote:
[snip]
> "Globally competitive" firms are pretty much uncoupled from *serving*
> consumers and that meaning of "competitive" is part of the
> obscurantist jargon of economic theological dogma intended for the
> laiety. The same is true of "consumer choice" and "free trade".
>
> Most small firms live or die by offering service and choice. A
> massive rejection can shake a big company, too, as we've seen with
> asbestos and British beef, but those cases are anomalies. For the
> transnationals, "we're competitive" means approximately "we're
> in charge here and we're winning", independent of everything else.
I am reminded of something from the 1950s Kefauver hearings
on the United States steel industry (ref. lost). I believe it was
the president of U.S. Steel who explained to the committee that
his firm was not competitive if it could not get as high
a price for its products as the other steel makers.
It is a shame that "postmodernists" have made such a
mockery of the notion of "deconstruction". There's a lot of
[to use a neutral word:] discourse out there that needs to be
deconstructed, not in terms of foppish semiotic
magic tricks (causing rabbits to disappear into hats, so to speak...),
but in terms of exposing the effective meaning of society-
shaping words like
"competitive" "free market" (dare I add "right to life"?), etc.,
esp. when used by persons in positions of power.
Certainly the recent U.S. Presidential election was an example
of this kind of obfuscation on both sides:
Neither Bush nor Gore said anything like: "Look, there
cannot be a real winner here, because even if we were
to determine that one of us really won by exactly 291 votes out of
5.8 million votes cast, that is no meaningful margin
of victory. Let's show everybody that the election was a
toss-up, and flip a coin to decide the winner." Both Bush
and Gore argued that somehow there was a magic number that would
reveal the American people's *univocal* "real choice", Bush by not counting
ballots, and Gore by counting them. But it's like the
old rule that precision in measurement beyond the accuracy of
the instrument is meaningless ("Our clock is
accurate to about 5 minutes a day and we haven't set it for
a month, but it says the time is 07:14:22.348...")....
"Yours in [hopefully cultivating...] discourse...."
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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