Introduction
Greetings loyal readers! As I write this on the New Moon in Aquarius (one month in advance, as usual - to get the kinks out) just a mile away from my cozy den in lower Manhattan our Chinese brothers and sisters are celebrating their lunar new year. This year marks the Asian Year of the Metal Dragon (or Iron Dragon, for our Tibetan siblings). Dragon is a fire sign corresponding to Sagittarius in the western zodiac. Fire is considered the luckiest element in Asian astrology, and Dragon is the luckiest fire sign. In fact, many Chinese people plan their families so as to give birth to children in Dragon years, making it four times as hard for Chinese Dragons to gain admission to Chinese universities!
The Year of the Dragon is immediately preceded by the Year of the Rabbit. The Year of the Rabbit is the calm before the storm, because Dragon Years are times of great activity and upheaval. This Dragon year will be no exception.
Energetic Forces of the Solar Wind
Unless you have been living under a rock all your life, chances are you know that our Sun is a giant ball of fiery exploding gases. These solar explosions (also known as solar flares or sunspots) create solar wind. This solar wind is so powerful that some astrophysicists (such as my friend Greg Matloff) have proposed making use of the solar wind to create solar sails that can propel spaceships and other interstellar craft. (I want one!)
Currently we are experiencing a period of such intense solar flare activity that the instruments we use to measure solar wind must be re-calibrated because the February readings were off the scale. Is this why there have been so many plane crashes? Keep watching for the signs.
Realization of Marxist Prophecy
Loosely translated, Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would succeed for a while and then eat itself. We now stand at the threshold of the realization of this maxim. The recent merger of media giant Time-Warner with Internet sumo wrestler AOL, the biggest monetary deal in financial history, was eclipsed only a few weeks later by the marriage of two of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies (Warner-Lambert and Pfizer), followed by two of the biggest wireless telecommunications carriers (Vodaphone and Mannesman). Now the US Department of Justice is investigating whether it should block the proposed merger of the two of the world’s largest oil companies (BP-Amoco and Arco).
Meanwhile, the events last fall in Seattle have woken the giant agro-businesses and chemical companies into the realization that the peoples of the world will not go quietly into the genetically-engineered “Frankenfoods” night. People of all countries are making it plain that they do not want to risk possible sterilization of indigenous plant species through the indiscriminate propagation of genetically modified plants. This is particularly true in light of the fact that many of these genetically engineered species do not perform as advertised. Alas, too many farmers are finding this out the hard way, as the heavily-hyped magic seeds they have purchased either do not thrive or are eaten by pests and predators anyway.
Given the rapid pace at which the Internet and other technological breakthroughs are changing our lives, concentration of political and economic power (which are increasingly the same thing, as the current support for campaign finance report attests to) in fewer and fewer hands creates the potential for complete domination and enslavement of the world’s population. The global power structure has, for decades, been trying to devise ways to make us like our servitude. They thought they had succeeded with television and movies. However, the world’s population grows increasingly media savvy and increasingly disgusted with violent, formulaic action films and television programs and corporate propaganda thinly disguised as news.
However, the giant multi-national corporations are about to find out how much the citizens of the world disapprove of uncaring corporate exploitation of labor and the environment. The instant worldwide communications and organizing capability the Internet affords, and which was responsible for the events at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last fall, will take down the world’s commercial giants.
This will happen in two ways. One way will be coordinated global walkouts. The corporate world will have to listen to labor’s demands if there is suddenly no one willing to do the corporations’ bidding. Although the world’s governments are increasingly dominated by police states, it will become very clear very quickly that the world’s police and military cannot kill or lock up millions and millions of people peacefully assembled and committed to mutual solidarity. There will be coordinated efforts around the globe to create legislative solutions to quell corporate greed.
Consider the following example. Most telephone psychic services charge $4.99 per minute. This amounts to approximately $300 per hour. Yet these services pay their psychics $10 per hour. This amounts to just over 3% of the gross. Now consider the fact that these psychics work from their homes and pay for their own telephones, and do not receive any employee benefits. So where does the other 97% of the money go? Some of it goes to marketing and administration expenses, but the rest is clear profit. Do you believe for a minute that people who own and operate the psychic telephone lines are taking a 3% profit and putting the rest into marketing and administration? Neither do I. Clearly this is an example of unconscionable abuse and exploitation of labor.
The next time you enter a sweepstakes or fill out a survey, considering the following. Most such results are tabulated off-shore by non-English speaking people (mostly women) who are pressured to type fast with few mistakes for $1.80 - $2.80 and hour. Many of these people experience keyboard-related injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, eyestrain and backaches. The same is true for typesetting of manuscripts. So the next time you read a paperback novel, consider the fact that the people who typeset it may be living in Barbados. And those people may be so exploited and underpaid that it would cost them a day’s salary to buy that book, if they had the time and literacy to read it.
What the corporations fail to realize is that there is an end point to how long this sort of thing can go on. While our Mickey Mouse news media blather on about how great the US economy is, the real fact is that working people have seen their buying power drop over the last three decades as wages have failed to keep pace with inflation. The economic expansion exists only for the rich, not for the rest of us. So while Rush Limbaugh complains that rich people can’t really help the poor because all their money is tied up in stock, the truth is that someone is out there driving up real estate values where all the big fancy homes are. Someone is driving around in expensive cars and piloting expensive yachts with cheap gas that the oil companies destroy our planet for. And someone in the US Government is using our tax dollars to subsidize those oil companies so the gas remains cheap. And then we have to listen to compassionless conservatives (“compassionate conservative” being the biggest oxymoron since “white supremacist Christian”) tell us why we should hate the poor and blame them for their plight.
What the Television Industry Doesn’t Get
The good news is that with all the billions of dollars being thrown at Internet businesses and all the hype surrounding the so-called information highway, the television industry executives are shaking in their shoes. As the Internet is increasingly accessible through television, satellite and wireless services, it will continue to converge and ultimately merge with traditional media. The television folks must adapt or perish, and since they haven’t a clue how new media works (nor the intellectual curiosity to actually find out) they’re floundering around in classic FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) mode.
Notice how the recent merger between Time-Warner and AOL illustrates this point. Back in the late 80s when Time first merged with Warner, I predicted that the deal would eventually prove disastrous for the new entity because there was simply too much debt involved. Any company that was debt-free and thriving would never have been in the position of becoming AOL’s (or anyone else’s) lunch. Time-Warner tried to venture into Internet waters on its own, using its tired old “we are the masters of the universe” television business model. The result was that tens of millions of dollars were poured down the drain developing Time-Warner's Pathfinder site, only to be rejected by the world’s web surfers. Getting bought by AOL was at least an admission by Time-Warner’s management that they’re clueless where the Internet is concerned. However, looking to Steve Case for a master cure is equally clueless.
Why? Because in order to get along with you business partners you have to understand how they think and how their business works. Time-Warner thought they could jump on-line and turn the Internet into television. The enlightenment they received on this particular issue was rude and painful. AOL, successful as they are, doesn’t get the full power of the Internet either, since they still cling to proprietary content, censorship of users, misuse of user’s personal information, and limitations on the number of people AOL users can communicate with at any one time in AOL chat rooms. Furthermore, I predict that Gerald Levin and Steve Case are going to get into the internecine personal disagreements the business world has seen since Ross Perot resigned from the Board of General Motors. People who don’t understand each other are not going to have an easy time of co-managing a business - especially one worth $145 billion dollars!
How did Time-Warner get itself into this position? Because they failed to learn an important lesson from the world of television advertising. I call it “the Alka-Seltzer problem.” Those of you who are old enough to remember the late sixties and early seventies will recall an award-winning television advertising campaign for Alka-Seltzer. (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.” Ring any bells?) The commercials were very funny, and the campaign produced a noticeable increase in Alka-Seltzer sales. Print and billboard ads reinforced the television ad campaign, with great benefit. But here’s where Alka-Seltzer made its big mistake.
Because sales were improving so dramatically, Alka-Seltzer’s financial people continued to forecaster greater and greater increases in sales as a result of their great ad campaign. They expanded and expanded in anticipation of their great increase in sales. But then a strange thing happened. After increasingly dramatically for months and months, sales suddenly began to level off. Alka-Seltzer’s business took a terrific dive. Why did this happen?
It turns out that the thing the Alka-Seltzer people failed to consider is that there is a finite amount of Alka-Seltzer the public can consume. People weren’t continuing to buy more Alka-Seltzer because they already had all the Alka-Seltzer they needed. Once Alka-Seltzer had captured the lion’s share of its market, sales could no longer increase because the existing demand had already been met.
This is the same problem the television industry executives are coming head-to-head with. There is a limit to the number of hours in a day that people are awake and consuming media. There is a limit to the number of Road Runner cartoons they want to watch. Indeed, there is a limit to the amount of television they want to watch. Current market research from multiple sources shows that people who have Internet access are spending less time watching television.
The other thing the television industry doesn’t understand is two-way broadcasting. Under the television model, they broadcast and we consume. With the Internet, and with convergence of television and the Internet, broadcasting becomes multi-lateral. Everyone is a potential broadcaster. They can interact with the main content providers and with each other. Unless the television industry can figure out how to profit from this model, it will be left by the wayside. This can’t happen soon enough for me.
Copyright 2000 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.
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