Here is the section on Le Roi from my new book: Modern Class Struggles in the Information Age Le Roi est le Roi Markets teach us to turn a blind eye toward the environmental damage occurring all around us. This defect reflects a far larger problem with markets in our economy. Today, pseudo-information takes precedence over real information. As a result, unmet social needs press in on us from all sides. Business has no reason to meet these needs in unless they can turn a sufficient profit. Political leaders tell us that we cannot even afford our present level of government spending on social or environmental programs, let alone commit enough funds to address these challenges adequately. So we watch our cities, as well as the global environment deteriorate. While the situation worsens daily, nobody steps forward to take responsibility for this mess. In earlier times, a king, or as the French would say, le roi, ruled supreme. He could set priorities and spend money in any way that he saw fit, no matter how arbitrary. Today, we have a new roi, or we should say, ROI, which commands our life. This new ROI is an acronym for the Return on Investment. This ROI, and this ROI alone, now determines what will or will not be done. As Kevin Phillips has summarized this rule of ROI: ##Finance has not simply been spreading into every nook and cranny of economic life: a sizeable portion of the financial sector, electronically liberated from past constraints, has put aside old concerns with funding the nation's long-range industrial future, has divorced itself from the precarious prospects of Americans who toil in factories, fields, or even suburban shopping malls, and is simply feeding wherever it can. [Phillips 1994, p. 81] The wild expansion of the domain this new ROI is far from accidental. Powerful interest groups, financed largely by great corporations or those who already have great wealth, have been hard at work reducing the public sphere of activity. This attack on the public sphere has taken several forms. Conservative think tanks dominate the media, spreading the promise of privatization. Sympathetic politicians underfund public activities, undermining the ability of the public sector to provide adequate services, thereby creating an impression of inefficiency. Finally, in the absence of public financing of elections, corporations more and more frequently can openly finance the election of those who favor their interest. Schools, prisons, roads sanitation, and just about any other sphere of public activity are on the road to becoming privatized. Public lands are turned over to private interests who see national treasures merely as sources of timber or minerals or a place to graze cattle. Public information is turned over to corporations, who then sell it to the same citizens whose taxes originally paid for developing the data. Someone once posted a message on the Internet that is too poignant let pass just because I cannot remember the source: ##The United States has become a place where your neighborhood video store is still open at midnight, while the library is closed at noon; where an advertising agency owns more computers and fax machines than it knows what to do with, while teachers have to wait in line to use a school's one functioning copying machine. [unknown source] The public sphere is subject to the will of the people, albeit only partially and to an diminishing extent. If we do not appreciate our schools or our city council, we have the possibility of voting to replace them. We can still even have some modest influence on the state or federal government. Corporations, in contrast, are responsible only to their shareholders. Yes, they are subject to the laws of the nation, but more and more corporations can rewrite the laws, often through the agency of compliant politicians, who often allow the corporations themselves to draft the laws that affect them. The shareholders, to whom the corporations owe their allegiance, single mindedly seek out the highest ROI. Sometimes a firm can improve its ROI through a new technology or an organizational innovation. More typically these days, corporations seek to inflate their ROI by cutting back. They cut back on wages, pensions, or medical care for their workers. They cut back on measures that will preserve the environment. With the help of the politicians whom they hold in tow, they cut back in taxes. The ROI flourishes while society decays. Our willingness to cede more and more authority to the corporations is tantamount to demanding, "Off with our heads." -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]