[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 yesterday (a 
holiday for me as the 25th of March 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
	A Proud Greek-Canadian
		



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