Just to take one part of Tom's piece,
-----Original Message-----
From: Timework Web [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: January 11, 2001 6:14 PM
To: FutureWork
Subject: Re: Examining ourselves, again
<snip, snip>
If I may leap over six years of research and many pages of analysis to a
rather bleak image, I would say that we are today living in a propaganda
echo chamber, crudely constructed at the turn of the 20th century by a
motley congregation of zealots, embezzlers, scare mongers, opportunists
and publicists. This group cooked up their own patented, ready-to-serve
economic mythology and sold it like breakfast cereal.
Did I say breakfast cereal? Grape-nuts to be exact. One of the principal
chefs of the pre-cooked doctrine was C.W. Post, dyspeptic inventor of
Grape-nuts and pioneer of the patent-medicine style of promoting packaged
processed foods. Another founding member of the crew was William Collison,
a one time trade union organizer who, when passed over for a paid
position, went off and started his own strike-breaking operation.
Here's how the echo chamber was set up. One of the group's front
organizations, say the Citizen's Industrial Alliance of America, would
hire a prominent, if somewhat moth-eaten and crusty, academic to deliver a
banquet speech on the labour issue. The esteemed professor's well-worn,
grubbily-solicited and cheaply-bought pastiche of hoary platitudes would
then be widely trumpeted as the indisputable consensus of the best
scientific minds in the field. The technique was exactly modeled on Post's
method of obtaining "medical" endorsements for the claimed health benefits
of his products, as was the practice of intimidating newspaper editors who
declined to go along with the show.
Over the years, the phony doctrine became textbook lore (without source
attribution, of course) and eventually one of the unexamined articles of
faith of mainstream economists. In the process, the mythology has managed
to displace the more progressive theoretical view -- as opposed to banquet
bluster -- developed by reputable economists in the first decade of the
century.
<snip, snip>
Cordell
And if we come forward in time we see the same techniquess with new players
and new stories.
Consider the BCNI and the early "research" done by the Fraser Institute or
the American Enterprise Institute or the Cato Foundation. The drumbeat of
"markets know best" "governments can only cause harm" "globalization is
inevitable " has been so constant (and so uncontested ) that before long it
became accepted as true.
Tom
Guess which view dominates the public policy decision process in Canada
(although not the analytical reports that end up being ignored by the
decision makers).
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island
(604) 947-2213
