[ga] The Ultimate.

[Sotiris Sotiropoulos <sotiris@worldatlarge.org>]

Lads and Lasses of the Popularly Democratic Element in this here General 
Assembly,

While doing a bit of pasttime reading on this day (a holiday for me as 
it marks the anniversary of Greek Independence), I ran across something 
which I found strikingly appropriate to our own circumstances here in 
the GA, and in ICANN generally:

"Decision-making on major issues is now vested in international institutions which are so remote from public influence, that the public has no idea what's going on. I mean, in the case of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), incidentally the Labor Advisory Committee report was never reported in the press, right, I'd be surprised if any of you know about it, here's a case where the government radically violated the law, demonstrated utter contempt for the democratic process, rammed through a secret executive agreement of enormous influence, wouldn't even let the one popular group that is supposed to see it by law, the labor- based group, even look at it, they write the report, and then the press censors it. All right, here we have the ultimate in the destruction of democracy, the ideal that everybody's been dreaming of. Not only is the rabble excluded, they don't influence policy, but they don't know what's in policy, and finally they don't know that they don't know. Virtually nobody knows that they don't know what is going on. Well, you know, now we've reached the ultimate. That's the ultimate possibility in the destruction of democracy."  
	-Noam Chomsky, "Old Wine, New Bottles: Free Trade, Global Markets and Military Adventures"
 
The complete article in its thoroughly engrossing entirety can be found at:  http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/talks/9302-uva.html

*************

Yours Very Truly,

Sotiris Sotiropoulos
		


--
This message was passed to you via the ga-full@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga-full" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html