what a f**k up:

A toy store owner was recently visited by Homeland Security agents. “One of the things that our agency’s responsible for doing is protecting the integrity of the economy and our nation’s financial systems and obviously trademark infringement does have significant economic implications.”
“My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim.” … the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik’s Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time. He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied. … agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint … Rubik’s Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy’s trademark.

Let me restate this: a secret police is protecting profits for corporations. Unbelivable.
That is the ultimate example why the ACLU was so concerned with the Patriot Act and the rest of the anti-terror legislation. It’s so easily abused.

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Nov 9 2004 1:27 utc | 3

Like I posted Friday over at ASZ, if some right wing asshole screws with me I will kick their ass. That is all they understand because they are not smart enough to think logically. I know I can outsmart them, but logic doesn’t penetrate their thick neanderskulls.
In another life I worked oil rigs, frequented bars and fought when I had to. I am still not to old to kick the shit out some fundie.
We have to get dirty, nasty, and wipe the face of the earth with their republican asses. Thats the way they think of dems. Sean Hannity on friday actually said he would like to see the total extinction of the dem party. Thats how they think. We need to get tough.

Posted by: jdp | Nov 9 2004 2:12 utc | 5

The thing is talking logical is not going to work. I live in a rural area and some people I know will fight you when they are loosing the arguement.
You must understand the mentality before you can defeat them. The Limblowhards and the like blur reality. There was an article on Slate by Jane Smiley that is still on there. Her take is you have to get down and dirty. If that means arguing and fighting to get your point across, so be it.
They want to squash any progressive like a bug. Thats there goal and Rove has said it. To marginalize dems to where there is a permanent rethug majority. Fight, fight, fight. Your useless macho swagger will put you toe to toe. Further, this fight must go back to the states and start at the grassroots.

Posted by: jdp | Nov 9 2004 2:39 utc | 7

I’ve been thinking… I wonder if at least some of this backlash from the conservative xtian, often rural voters is connected to agribusiness. before you say Whoa Deanander, what have you been smoking, hear me out…
over the last 20-30 years — maybe 50 years but it’s been accelerating lately — the American rural population has been pushed to the wall by agribusiness in various ways. buying power has been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (just like media) with giant food processing companies like ADM and ConAgra getting a headlock on the market, price fixing, etc. … commodity prices have been forced so low that many farmers are operating at a net loss. some lucky ones manage to work the state/fed subsidy system, but millions of others are in dire financial straits.
I read a few years ago that the suicide rate for farmers in the US was waaay up there, up among the top 5 or so by profession. one reason is the endless financial squeeze. not only the commodity pricing, rigged markets, cartels, etc. but also the eternal treadmill of pesticide and petrofertiliser dependency, overcapitalisation (deeply in debt after purchasing heavy equipment which then doesn’t pay for itself and costs a fortune to maintain). and then, compounding all this, comes along the GMO seed technology and having to pay license fees for seeds that were touted as “miracles” but in most cases produced smaller yields, leading to net loss for the farmer.
the result is that more and more farming families have been forced off their land by bankruptcy and foreclosure. more and more US farmland is owned by, guess what, just a handful of enormous agricorps. many farmers are now just shareholders on what used to be their family’s land, planting what they’re told to plant, spending most of their time operating machinery, living like factory workers. hence the depression, suicides, etc.
so here’s my thought. what if all this expropriation and loan sharking and destruction of communities has fuelled an enormous rage in the “heartland,” and what if it’s easy for these people to identify the corporate Baddies who are stealing their land and livelihood, with the “East Coast Big City Folks” (and West Coast Lazy Yuppie Buggers who refuse to pay a fair price for groceries)? what if a lot of this backlash is actually the fruit of our insane agricultural policy, ripening into something poisonous?
if so, seems to me that a program of land reform and sustainable farming revival could very quickly restore dignity, profit, and meaning to the lives of rural folks. I note that in at least one PA county where friends of mine live, the conventional (English) farmers are always moaning and whining about how bad life is, but the Amish with their low-tech, hands-on habits are thriving. now, the Amish are not exactly my model farmers — they use a lot of pesticides, which may seem contradictory but at present even the Old Order Rule permits it. but they do demonstrate that a prosperous life is possible on the land, if your idea of prosperity is modest (doesn’t include 3 SUVs and several monster harvesters etc) and you don’t try to farm more land than your family can deal with.
anyway, just a thought that floated through my head — we’ve abused and short-changed and kicked around our farmers for half a century, and now — surprise — they’re angry. and there are clever people waiting in the wings to tell them just whom to be angry with.

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 9 2004 7:45 utc | 9

Seems like I saw someplace today that Bushes numbers actually fell 2% in rural / small town America this last election, while his urban numbers rose 7%. While this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, at some point these folks are going to, collectively hit bottom — so maybe they have.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 9 2004 8:16 utc | 11

I’m not the only one wondering about the possibilities for revival in the stripmined heartland of America. this proposal from Steve Ongerth may be a bit simplistic — every proposal is always simplistic on paper, unless it’s the size of the Encyc Brit, and then who would read it? — but I think he has an idea worth exploring.

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 9 2004 8:33 utc | 13

@annamissed, some of those city folks are country folks now living in urban poverty. worldwide the pattern is the same, when peasants are forced off their land they head for the cities where some kind of a life can be eked out — on welfare, or by begging or stealing or dealing. I wonder how many people in the hollowed-out cities of the Midwest have lived there more than a generation or a half-generation? the decline in the number of rural families is precipitous — scary!

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 9 2004 8:35 utc | 15

DeAnander’s thoughts on the farm vote is a field
that has already been well ploughed by Thomas Frank
in his book

What’s the matter with Kansas?
which takes it’s title from an earlier classic.
Frank’s book has a lot of interesting “local color” as well, including a charming chapter on Kansan “sede vacantisme”.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 9 2004 9:17 utc | 17

@DA
Your link, those ideas are good, reminds me of the success that some farmers have found in going organic and making it work. Where I live there are also quite a few co-op small agri-business that are doing okay with a kind of subscription farming, albeit on a small scale — it is working now for some years.
As far as understanding the big picture, historically, with relation to this seeming theocratic revolution I found the Digby post yesterday very interesting, even though as an ideology it’s hard to pin it down, it does have some ring of truth about it, particularly how religion can make it’s appeal palitable to more base emotions of raceism and the like.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 9 2004 9:31 utc | 19

whats happening with “memory hole”?
http://www.thememoryhole.org/
All we need memory.!

Posted by: curious | Nov 9 2004 9:47 utc | 21

I’ve been saying before that I am a “liberal” in both the American and the French (opposed) meanings of the word, and now the Economist has a similar editorial in their last edition.
I’ll shamelessly paste in a bit of that editorial (link, but it’s subscription only)

Nov 4th 2004
From The Economist print edition
There’s a word for that
And we want it back
ALL through this election campaign, George Bush has flung the vilest term of abuse he knows at John Kerry. You name the policy—Mr Kerry’s support for punitive taxes and reckless public spending, as Mr Bush put it; his preference for stifling government and overweening bureaucracy; his failure to stand up for, oh, expensive new weapons systems, microscopic embryos and the sanctity of marriage—and the president’s verdict in each case was the same. “There’s a word for that,” he said, again and again. “It’s called liberalism.”
What more need one say? And Mr Kerry was not just any sort of liberal: he had actually been the most liberal member of the Senate. When told this, appalled Republicans jeered more loudly than if Mr Bush had accused his challenger of eating babies. (That man dared to run for president! Did he think he would not be found out?) Understandably, Mr Kerry was sometimes wrong-footed by this egregious defamation. Occasionally, smiling nervously, he said he was not ashamed to be liberal. (Audacious, but perhaps unwise.) At other times he tried to deny it. (You see, he protests too much.) In America, that kind of accusation cannot easily be shrugged off.
Language
Stanford’s “Encyclopedia of Philosophy” defines liberalism.
“Liberal” is a term of contempt in much of Europe as well—even though, strangely enough, it usually denotes the opposite tendency. Rather than being keen on taxes and public spending, European liberals are often derided (notably in France) for seeking minimal government—in fact, for denying that government has any useful role at all, aside from pruning vital regulation and subverting the norms of decency that impede the poor from being ground down. Thus, in continental Europe, as in the United States, liberalism is also regarded as a perversion, a pathology: there is consistency in that respect, even though the sickness takes such different forms. And again, in its most extreme expression, it tests the boundaries of tolerance. Worse than ordinary liberals are Europe’s neoliberals: market-worshipping, nihilistic sociopaths to a man. Many are said to believe that “there is no such thing as society.”
Yet there ought to be a word—not to mention, here and there, a political party—to stand for what liberalism used to mean. The idea, with its roots in English and Scottish political philosophy of the 18th century, speaks up for individual rights and freedoms, and challenges over-mighty government and other forms of power. In that sense, traditional English liberalism favoured small government—but, crucially, it viewed a government’s efforts to legislate religion and personal morality as sceptically as it regarded the attempt to regulate trade (the favoured economic intervention of the age). This, in our view, remains a very appealing, as well as internally consistent, kind of scepticism.
Parted in error
Sadly, modern politics has divorced the two strands, with the left emphasising individual rights in social and civil matters but not in economic life, and the right saying the converse. That separation explains how it can be that the same term is now used in different places to say opposite things. What is harder to explain is why “liberal” has become such a term of abuse. When you understand that the tradition it springs from has changed the world so much for the better in the past two and a half centuries, you might have expected all sides to be claiming the label for their own exclusive use.
However, we are certainly not encouraging that. We do not want Republicans and Democrats, socialists and conservatives all demanding to be recognised as liberals (even though they should want to be). That would be too confusing. Better to hand “liberal” back to its original owner. For the use of the right, we therefore recommend the following insults: leftist, statist, collectivist, socialist. For the use of the left: conservative, neoconservative, far-right extremist and apologist for capitalism. That will free “liberal” to be used exclusively from now on in its proper sense, as we shall continue to use it regardless. All we need now is the political party.

I don’t always agree with the Economist, and I doubt that many of you on this site are fans, but I’m mostly with them on this one.

Posted by: Jérôme | Nov 9 2004 11:18 utc | 23

Where I live, we have a booming organic and traditional farming community and a vibrant farmer’s market that sells in outdoor venues three days a week. There are Amish farmers, hippie farmers, long-time area family farmers, Asian immigrant farmers (with great Asian pears, btw). They sell produce, cheese, yarn, meat, plus flowers and rugs…
Local restaurants have made arrangements to get their produce from these local farmers, too.
You have to buy their produce, rather than agri-biz produce, in order for them to survive. You have to buy heirloom vegetables in order for them to survive. You have to buy a variety of, say, apples in order to have a variety of apples…and in order to save the world from modified and monoculture farming.
It’s as simple as that.
Where I live, lots of people support local farmers. You can ask your grocery store where their produce comes from and tell them that you want to buy locally-grown produce, and will shop at a place that sells it.
The market extends into November here…and I live in a place where it can and does snow in November.
Or grow your own, instead of buying agri-biz produce, if the cost for fresh produce seems too great. Eat seasonally, as well, if you want to make agri-biz less powerful.
Anyone want a great, traditional recipe for red cabbage? 🙂 I’ve got several heads of the same out in my backyard. Typically, you eat it with potatoes and pork (although I can’t get really good sausage here), but if you’re a vegetarian, you can skip the pork or substitute tofu, I suppose.
Think globally, eat regionally.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 9 2004 13:03 utc | 25

Dollar decline gathers momentum
How about a corresponding thread?

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Nov 9 2004 14:03 utc | 27

i remember hearing a statistic that only 2% of the US population are farmers. i see a figure from 2000 citing farming, fishing & forestry making up a combined 2.5% of the work force by occupation. i would expect that the majority of small farmers know where to direct their angers, at the monster agbiz corporations, rather than the end user. my limited exp w/ family farmers is that they know their land and understand where the money goes.
i find it more substantial to indict the merchants of spin. relatedly, douglas rushkoff takes the reins on another frontline rpt tonite, the persuaders

FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar “persuasion industries” of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public. In this documentary essay, correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (correspondent for FRONTLINE’s “The Merchants of Cool”) also explores how the culture of marketing has come to shape the way Americans understand the world and themselves and how the techniques of the persuasion industries have migrated to politics, shaping the way our leaders formulate policy, influence public opinion, make decisions, and stay in power.

Posted by: b real | Nov 9 2004 15:30 utc | 29

There are family farmer soy growers, but of course I couldn’t tell you what percentage of the market they make up.
Jerome re subsidies: I doubt if you’d find a single democratic country in the world that doesn’t give those subsidies to farmers and suffer from the same problems. It is a big deal everywhere and it’s an important point. In the EC maybe more people take a look at it, but we’ve got the same sorts of problems here.

Posted by: x | Nov 9 2004 15:46 utc | 31

Indeed, from what I’ve observed, farm subsidies, “market” pressures, small farmers being screwed up, talk about reducing subsidies or actual reductions, seem to be widely spread in the industrialised world. Alas, the trend seems to be the same pretty everywhere, with some countries where they’re really completely screwed, and others where they’re gonna be screwed big time.
By the way, Jérôme, what’s your take on the current mess in Ivory Coast? I remember having met some French guy on a whole other board, who was basically saying this was all a plot of the US to take control of all W Africa, so that they wouldn’t have much trouble or competition to get the oil there. Abidjan still seems a bit far from Nigeria to me.

Posted by: Anonymous | Nov 9 2004 16:00 utc | 33

The scam is so simple. The key sale word is ‘efficiency’.
New legislation is crafted by the lobbysts in such a way as to be beneficial to Big Agriculture. Those companies receive the same support per ton of product, but also benefit from their own economies of scale.
Small farmers benefit, too, so that they defend the legislation. They get a few thousand bucks. But in the long run they get eaten by the bigger fish.
You see, when legislation is crafted, it obviously has to promote productivity and discourage form waste. It has to be ‘efficient’. You produce more, you get more.
But since we are talking about subsidies, they already ARE a distortion of the market. If their are supposed to be a solution to a social problem (farmer bankruptcies), why make them ‘efficient’?
Bio-fuels are such a scam. (the rural parties in the Polish Parliament want it) If you legislate that gasoline has to contain 5% of bio-fuels, there will be a huge demand for it from the refineries. They will prefer huge, reliable suppliers, not the tiny farms, whose welfare is the moral justification.

Posted by: MarcinGomulka | Nov 9 2004 16:07 utc | 35

yes, there are family farm soy growers. some are in my family. they switched from tobacco to soy as a cash crop years ago. If you shop at a grocery co-op, you can also find other soy product makers.
Okay, Red Cabbage
(please pardon for this digression)
..and this one…
because I have to first make sure you know how to boil potatoes.
to go with red cabbage, you want “old” potatoes, not new (waxy) ones. anyway, you peel and cut the pototates and boil them in (salted) water. then you drain the water out of them when they are soft enough to break apart. THEN, you either 1. put them back on a VERY LOW heat and shake the pot until they are flaky, or 2. you can also try putting a (clean) dishtowel on top of them to absorb moisture and shake them until they’re flaky.
so here’s the recipe for Choux Rouge aux Pommes (which you can and should make well ahead of the actual meal)
Put 2 T. butter in a heavy casserole/pot and add 2 large, thinly sliced onions. Over LOW heat, cook the onions, stirring frequently, until soft. do not brown.
Add 1 firm head of RED cabbage (about 8 cups)
Cover and lower the heat and cook, without stirring, for about 15 minutes. Check to make sure the heat is low enough and shake the pot to keep the cabbage from scorching. Add a little (1/4 cup) water if the cabbage is scorching…and lower the heat…
Add 4 granny smith or other tart cooking apples (peeled, cored and sliced thinly)
1/8 cup sugar (older recipes call for more, but I cut it in half)
1/4 cup water
Salt, pepper
1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg
Stir all this in with the cabbage and onions.
Simmer over LOW HEAT and COVERED for one and a half hours….you have to let it cook this long, btw or the flavors will not blend and taste right.
okay, no more recipes today, I promise.

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 9 2004 17:10 utc | 37

Marcin, I agree. Medley:
US and EU agriculture is massively subsidised, as we all know.
My experience of small (and I stress small, and include organic farmers in France, but in the South..) is different from Jerome’s. While they may beef at this and that (e.g. the asparagus crops no longer being economically viable because of competition from Spain) they all know they are living off those subsidies and are thankful for them.
Some live just off the subisidies. Literally. They slash, lay fallow, plant and grow according to a scheme decided in Brussels. One year sunflowers (seeds, oil, save water), another year melons, etc. They don’t like that too much .. and talk of communist central organisation (negatively). One family I know has sent three kids to college by abandoning its vines. (Damn shame, the wine was delicious.)
However, they well realise they cannot sell -say apricots, though that example is from CH- on the open market and make a profit.
The more ambitious ones have made money, and will make more, by investing in and developing specialist products, going for niche markets, etc., such as expensive wines, fig jam, smoke cured ham, etc. About that, the newspapers report regularly with fanfare.
Many are aware that the totting up the subsidies they receive and the hidden costs which are partly paid for (gas, nitrogen fertiliser, water at a low price, reduction on agricultural machinery, etc.) and their output, what they can sell it for, renders any proper accounting or inititative impossible. They have become dependent. (US farmers are in the same position but dont seem to realise it?)
Result: apathy and an undergound economy. All have family gardens, all practise barter.
As the Swiss say, hey it is a pity that you can’t outsource cows. Nor just ship em off elsewhere.
Ha ha. Though there is one person who has done that – Mixed breed Hollsteins or whatever (I’m not up on cows) – sent em to Mexico! Sells French camembert in Mexico and imports Emmenthaler and Gruyère back into Switzerland!
Lot of red tape but profitable allright.
Insanity.
All that said, as pointed out above, the % of farmers in the US is tiny. Most of the people who voted for Bush are not suffering because of a dying, mortgage-called-back, farms. They are suffering because their income is small (wall-mart, carpet business, fishing, loss of industrial and manufactuing jobs, no market for minimal secretarial skills, dependency on world market for soy beans, no cultural edge, failing shops, no clients in small service biz..etc….), the education of their children is dismal …and they know it.

Posted by: Blackie | Nov 9 2004 18:19 utc | 39

@Blackie, sorry I don’t think my original post was quite clear. I was speculating that a chunk of the Bush support bloc in the cities of the Red persuasion (isn’t it funny how the pundits have reversed the traditional meaning of “Red” in US politics?) may be the children of ex-farming families, with a family history of despair and resentment. I mean, my old Mum still loathes the French because of the Norman Conquest — don’t tell me peasants can’t hold a grudge. the destruction of family farming has taken quite a few decades and its victims, many of them, may be slaving away at WalMart now, but they have living memory or oral tradition of a better time before those city slickers ruined everything.

Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 9 2004 18:30 utc | 41

Yes DeA, quite right. Long memories. Yes.
The color coding of the parties in the US throws me off everytime. Here, progressives are shaded red to pink, and conservatives blue (blue blood) to yellow – muddy colors. Green is for – greens. Orange is used for wildcats!
The whole rainbow is represented.
The ‘automobiliste’ party (now defunct) had trouble finding a color – they finally picked orange.
The prostitute lobby chose -after 10 or so committee meetings – purple!

Posted by: Blackie | Nov 9 2004 19:03 utc | 43

again a fascinating thread (although not so much about liberalism…)
In France, you still have very lively markets several days a week, so i suppose that many farmers still produce “organically” and sell locally. Of course, this is most certainly undercounted in the official statistics, but it’s quite real and you do get high-quality (if expensive) produce. Also definitely worth it for the life, both social and economic, that it brings along.
The European CAP (Common Agriculture policy) was designed at a time when food supply was still an issue, and sadly, it shows that well-meaning subsidies are impossible to eliminate even when they have fulfilled their role. The stay on, create bad incentives (in that case, an endless quest for hiher productivity) and constrain everybody’s behavior; Those that live off that (banks, bureaucrats, unions) fight to preserve the status quo and everybody feels that they have to make do with (and make the best of) “the system”, thus perpetuating the whole thing. Sad.
In France, you had this strong attachment to land/earth – everybody’s grandfather was a farmer, and thus everybody sees farmer with tenderness and thus supports their subsidies and tolerates their antics. (As a French person with 4 urban – and university-educated – grandparents, I’m definitely out of tune with my compatriotes there).
re – taylorism/fordism. it does make sense when tasks are endlessly repeated and require little or no quilifications. The model is becoming less and less relevant these days. when you have highly specialised tasks which require highly qualified workers, you are in a totally different logic, and that’s where most of Europe’s industry and a growing part of its agriculture is.

Posted by: Jérôme | Nov 9 2004 20:17 utc | 45

No one around?

Posted by: Jérôme | Nov 10 2004 8:18 utc | 47

@ Jérôme
I am immediately out of my depth in any discussion of efficiency in economics, but do recall that one of the
classical dialectics there is between efficiency and equity. Clearly a lot of people are trampled as the economic elephants impose there (varying) versions
of economic efficiency, and almost as clearly the ur-communist idea of total equity seems to have been
tried and found wanting. (Of course, it can be “saved”
if one asserts that it was never really tried, but, alas, the same holds for lots of other great ideas like “love thy neighbor”: inspirational but not susceptible of implementation.) Does the efficiency of a WalMart produce more misery for the masses than its low prices mitigate? Most in this forum would undoubtedly respond that it does. Yet WalMart style economies of scale should be (or should have been) the strong point of large socialized economies like the Soviet Union or China. In the former they never seem to have materialized in a convincing way (except perhaps in the production of outstanding textbooks),
but maybe the Chinese are in the process of giving the world a better model for reconciling the two opposites than is currently “on the market”. Bettering the models of economic relations already available in Western Europe, Japan, and yes, even the U.S. won’t be a trivial task The risk of a Chinese “capitalist involution” is all too evident but given the lately demoralizing status of “the leading nation of the free world” it’s hard to be hopeful that good news is going to be coming from the U.S. over the next four years. I am one of those who think that the fundamental cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union
was the presence of a prosperous and democratic Western Europe “right at the doorstep”. Is a rich and
Marxist-Confucian China the only hope for moderating the rapacious tendencies of the current U.S. ruling clique? If so, it looks like we’ll be waiting even more than 4 years.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Nov 10 2004 11:37 utc | 49

It’s strange how things are shifting around. Similar, somewhat, to LonesomeG’s point above, I was struck by the thoughts in the recent rant posted at Steve Gilliard’s blog via email from a reader: They Voted For This Mess and how they compared to my Republican mother’s longterm complaints about what’s wrong with the country that I’ve heard for decades. Strongly pro-choice, she was always one of those conservatives who resented standing in line behind people paying for groceries at the supermarket with welfare stamps who never bothered to budget their purchases and clip coupons as she did, etc. The rant at Gilliard’s blog sounded like her reasons for having historically voting Republican over the past couple of decades (that is, those before the Fundie era of the Republican party). The talk of succession of those who work harder, are more educated, self-made, and pay more taxes to pick up the tab for the dumbed down in the middle sounds all very familiar. There’s something important in that, I think.

Posted by: x | Nov 10 2004 15:31 utc | 51

My uneducated take on efficiency is that “economies of scale” work well – to a point. Eventually, the scale gets so large that the bureauracy that runs them is too removed from the product(s) delivered to be efficient. Innovation and adjustment to circumstances becomes ponderous at best and sometimes impossible.
Top line management in large enterprises often know very little about the nuts and bolts of their enterprise. For example, new CEOs are often recruited from very different industries; the important thing at that level is to have experience running a large organization, not an understanding the actual day to day business they are in. However, these are the same people, along with the board members they appoint who are expected to be loyal to them, who have to provide leadership for that enterprise. Consequently, management can often pursue objectives that make sense to them but damage the underlying foundations of the business they manage. As an example, I believe Ford’s aggressive acquisition of other companies in the 1990’s – a management initiative – directed attention away from their cars, damaging their product line; more knowledgeable people might disagree, however. Another example might be Freddie Mac, where I worked for a while, which cobbled together financial “products” of questionable integrity for short term gain that may have serious financial repercussions for them in the future. A third might be MacIntosh in the 1980’s where Jobs brought in the CEO from Pepsi who sat on a cash cow for seven years without innovation until Microsoft became competitive. Enron might be another, where top line management jettisoned their original business, based on real assets, to become energy traders. Those at ground level in these businesses would probably have made very different decisions.
Another problem with being “large” is that fundametal shifts at ground level in a business that might require a change in strategy are generally not noticed by top line management until the problems are reflected in the books – much too late. (Just an aside, but I have wondered whether our current emphasis on marketing and image rather than product and delivery – style over substance, in my opinion – is related to the distance between top management and the large businesses they manage.) When the ground has moved underneath the behemoths, a shift unnoticed or misunderstood at the top of large organizations, innovation is only possible at ground level, the grass roots. My bottom line: huge economies of scale are not always the most efficient way to go in the long run, from either a business or a social perspective.

Posted by: Anonymous | Nov 10 2004 16:13 utc | 53

This is my Party and I believe the way people should go.
Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Nov 10 2004 20:01 utc | 55