Earthside Comments: Few will disagree that what Rochelle Riley describes in this column, the trend towards consolidation and concentration of ... well, everything ... is happening. Whether this is good or not is where the controversy resides. Earthside favors a more populist, small, competitive free market system and a more individualistic-oriented culture. What we are seeing develop under the agenda of the Bush regime is the mega-corporatization of virtually every economic and social aspect of our culture -- from mega-churches with congregations in the thousands, to school districts so encompassing that students are just testing statistics, to a greater concentration of power in the central federal government and military than at any other time in U.S. history. And ... we don't like it.
Link: America Has Become One | Rochelle Riley/Detroit Free Press
Here's where we're headed economically and socially in America. There will be two stores, a department store and a discounter -- probably Macy's and Wal-Mart -- that will compete with a million specialty stores selling each item from those stores or high-end stuff most Americans can't afford. There will be one airline, LMS: Last Man Standing. There will be one TV network, owned by the nation's largest corporation, with 500 partners that show reruns. ... There will be one national network of art museums and no history museums because we will have decided that our pasts don't matter. Corporations will get naming rights to national monuments, because we, after all, will have stopped caring about history. So there will be the Enron George W. Bush Memorial and the Halliburton Dick Cheney Iraq War Memorial. Millions will visit the Burger King Thomas Jefferson Memorial. But not one person will sadly shake their head at the frivolity of it. We can't fight the monolithic, monopolistic one-original-thought trend that we've embraced. The takeovers and consolidations will make us an imploding single entity, one nation under Macy's. But beneath that entity will be a splintering that will take us farther from each other.
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