We do not need to be futurists to be able to recognize the social patterns that may prevail in the years ahead. The institutional Arrangements that are being established or are already in place often for tell much of the shape and sense of future living routines. 1 hard to miss characteristic of the current institutional landscape is the wave of privatization sweeping over Society pushing back and often eliminating spheres of activity. That historically have been public and non-commercial. Indigent Municipal governments, for example supplicate private companies to build or maintain their parks and other social services shopping centers offer occasional resting places to weary shoppers, but their interior walls or private enclaves whose owners are insistent on their right to deny Public Access at their discretion. I might say this is a point that we might come back to later along. This is really it sounds trivial but it's a very very significant matter in terms of the denial of public space financially stricken public institutions are in able to remain open on selected days or evenings through the large just a private patrons who sometimes and Scribe their corporate logos in Gilt letters on the entrance doors. The private development of what was once public space and activity reaches further. Some of the most prestigious museums are establishing joint housekeeping with corporate Partners in Stamford, Connecticut. For example of branch of the Whitney has moved into the champion international corporation complex the same Trend set of the Whitney will be opening another Branch almost like a transnational banking corporation in the Philip Morris corporation's new headquarters at 42nd Street and Park Avenue in New York City. These are admittedly small markers, but there are more substantive indicators of the decline of the public sphere. Public school systems are shut down weeks or months ahead of schedule closing because of exhausted finances public libraries across the country are open on a part-time basis only and unable often to maintain even this partial service Mass public transit in a number of cities major urban areas is near collapse. The public males are in no better shape and private Delivery Systems are flourishing. These conditions would seem to describe a decaying social order yet. It is an incomplete picture alongside these faltering and decrepit Public Services exists another realm of what appears to be much more efficiently operating activity. It is under the direction of the corporate business community and avails itself of huge pools of capital. An awesomely concentrated corporate structures the greatest share of the nation's production investment employment and profits are accounted for by a few hundred giant company these same corporations undertake their operations on a global scale majority of the of them obtaining substantial fractions of their revenues from International activity. All their causal connections between the unparalleled affluence of the corporate and the impoverishment of the public sectors. Certainly, the relationship is complex interactive and generally not deliberate one obvious consequence of the creation of a strong private corporate sector of economic activity is its ability to control its General operational environment. In an economically context this means having a capability and talent. to extract advantages from the political system At the same time it restricts its obligations to that order to the barest minimum. the corporate Community achieve this objective brilliantly It secures every kind of economic subvention from government sources local state and federal that legal Minds can construct simultaneously the noise to each of these governmental levels. Also through legal means as much as possible, which is a very great amount indeed of what should be its contribution to the upkeep of the social infrastructure. It is noted occasionally though hardly given the attention. It deserves that the corporate income tax is practically been repealed through the practice of widespread exemptions and allowances and while corporate strategies for withholding funds from General Social Services achieve striking success other individual property holders are no less Adept in adopting tactics of tax avoidance. It is reported for example, and I quote that 44% of all capital gains profits on sales of Securities real estate Commodities and other forms of wealth went unreported to the Internal Revenue Service a 1981. And this is probably an understatement it follows that a significant source of the public sectors you can on a crows is the ability of property to determine National Resort allocation property holders, especially the major corporate ones do not contribute in proportion to their capacity to pay or to the benefits. They receive this is a relatively straightforward public private sector relationship. All the developments affecting adversely the public sphere of American Life on mediated by a combination of technological social and political factors that are not always a simple to disentangle and examined. Although that is what I shall try to do in the rest of this talk. Possibly the most recent and far-reaching of these developments is the emergence of what is coral The Information Society. Based on the widespread use of a new information technology. This represents a massive shift in the underpinning structure and activity of the economy. One of its most consequential effects is the pressure that is exerted to compel the privatization of some of the country's most vital cultural Communications activities. The information age it is claimed will create the conditions that will offer each individual as well as the community overall Untold cultural and informational opportunities. But reality once again is confounding the image the great capabilities of the new information technology instead of increasing or diminishing information equality in the nation. This occurs because information is being transformed into a commodity to be soft to be bought and sold. No information has been purchased and sold for a long time. The situation is different now because of the capability of the computer to assemble process select and disseminate information in an astonishing variety of ways. It makes information an item that can be and is used increasingly in the production process as well as becoming the key element in most of the service industries that now employ 70% of the American Workforce in a word. Information is now of valuable good from which money can be made accordingly. It is being generated list stored and distributed on the rules and by private sources that govern economically activity in the rest of the economy. The consequences of the changing importance and growing commercialization of information are extraordinary. Once information is a saleable item. As it is now the public institutions that customarily have produced preserved and disseminated it universities libraries and the government itself. All themselves forced to become privatized or lose their function in the information process. The wisdom of Commerce is that profitable information is too valuable a resource to be left to public servants. To a large extent treating information is a commodity accounts for the changes and pressure has seemingly arbitrary and rude affecting public cultural informational institutions all over the country as recently as 1979 a museum director could call upon the example of libraries and universities to defend the principle of public financing. The director of the Cleveland Museum of Art for example declared on that date that museums and I quote should be like libraries and universities and get their money with as few strings attached as possible. This is no longer either an appropriate comparison or recommendation. Those units of the nation's universities which are sources of potentially profitable information microbiology. Micro Electronics artificial intelligence and several other fields are being integrated financially or structurally with corporate Enterprise this past March for example, a private meeting the public and press were excluded brought together again, I quote the presidents of five major universities with the leaders of 10 high technology companies and a group of prominent scientists to try to work out guidelines that govern the growing commercialization of scientific research, especially in biotechnology. Science magazine reported that the Pajero Dunes conference, which was where this conference took place. This conference was unable to resolve such as use as the exclusive rights that industry secures from the University Research it sponsors. Why are universities are beginning to be in meshed and a widening net of commercial Enterprise? Public and University libraries are experiencing similar pressures from the pull and tug of private information suppliers and vendors. Holdings and Acquisitions are being put into machine-readable formats. Why libraries themselves are being obliged to link up their facilities with the database. He's offered by commercial vendors Lockheed system Development Corporation vrs and others. Library information capability undeniably is greatly enhanced. But this benefit is accompanied by the abandonment of libraries historical free access policy user charges are introduced the public character of the library is weakening as its commercial dependents deepens. No less important the composition and character of its Holdings change as the clientele shifts from the general public to the ability to pay user some of you who are students or people related to the university and the large research libraries may already have personal experience of these rather General statements here when you know what happens when you go for a computer search the fees being introduced and the allocation of Library resources to What type of activity which increasingly is being put on an ability to pay faces? Some of the powerful forces are at work in the nation's largest Storehouse of publicly generated information the national government's information Supply. Increasingly the heavy output and great Holdings of scientific and social information of the federal government are being organized packaged and sold by private information companies information, which was produced originally from the expenditures of public funds is being acquired by private information companies for commercial sale. The privatization of the governmental information Supply is a complex process which includes the transfer of public data to corporate ownership and a combination of policies that are reducing or eliminating for public access to publicly compiled information. This by the way is the information the national government. Bill's up and its various ongoing governmental activities, which I paid for out of general. That means all of our pockets General taxation. Privatization of public information in the governmental sector is undertaken with careful Symantec protection and I quote in a relatively short time a library Publications States. The phrase National information policy has had its meaning drastically narrowed from designation of the collective needs and rights of all Americans to a kind of code word expressing the concerns of the private sector and especially its claims to the riches. It perceives in the bureaucratic Wilderness preserve government produced and distributed information. The new information technology in addition to being used to create an ability to pay standard for information which used to be socially available. Facilitates the privatization of information and human values and still more direct ways. the flexibility and penetrability of the new instrumentation and the greatly expanded number of channels available for message transmission. Enable none media Corporation Enterprises whose main economic activity is not media production. That means companies not like Columbia broadcasting system or ABC or the National Broadcasting Company as a part of RCA, but other companies whose activities may be in oil or chemicals or in electrical products. This is what is meant by non media companies permits these to engage heavily and message making and dissemination the television production facilities at the disposal of the big nun media firms already surpassed. The installations owned by the commercial National media Networks. If you can imagine that that means that what is held in production facilities television production facilities film production facilities in the auspices under the auspices control and ownership of these non-media corporations in the aggregate surpasses. The facilities owned by ABC CBS NBC and a media companies you get some notion of the size of these Holdings The outpouring of corporate messages directly to General Publix is still in an early age early-stage but already it is considerable cable TV and video cassettes are favored means of distribution. Programs for Implant audiences ordinarily are transmitted through closed-circuit systems. But much of this corporate media production is offered without cost to commercial outlets and maybe played in entirety or in part off and without attribution to the original producer what this means is that let us say just as an example of hypothetical case an oil company makes a cassette which it euphemistically typhoons the romance of oil or another euphemistic title The Adventure of the pipeline and makes a half hour or hour video tape very well done by Professional Standards Fine Photography. Excellent music Vine script writing they have all of these facilities talents creative abilities all under their control and then we'll distribute. This is done continuously. And increasingly will send out 500 video cassettes the 500 TV channels commercial channels around the country and these channels may or may not use they may or may not use all of it. And then you'll just a part of it may use a snippet of it may use a large apartment. Use all of it. Very often is not mentioned that you're receiving a program brought to you by the Goodwill in finances of the actual producer. It'll just be incorporated in programming why will commercial channels do this. I don't want to sound jaundiced, but the only answer is greed. They get a free program and then they can just play it. It's not quite as good as getting a free commercial, but it's pretty close. Some suggestion of the possibly greatly enhance future significance of private corporate media outputs all the rulings of the Supreme Court in recent years. In one important case in 1978 the Court ruled that corporate speech. I repeat corporate speech is entitled to the same protection as individual speech under the first amendment in this startling but not inconsistent with early interpretations. The Bill of Rights is made an accomplice of privatization and corporate power. Now, we are still in the very early state of this type of development, but the signs are there the rulings are there the direction is all that. Another form of privatization in the informational field is advertising. Alongside these new forms of private message creation and dissemination. There is the ongoing and continuously expanding volume of commercial advertising penetrating deeper and extinguishing further what remains of individual and public space? The decades the United States has had the dubious leadership of the world. This is one place where we can say without any fear of challenge. We're number one. The United States has had leadership of the world and its advertising expenditures where the calculated an absolute amounts or on a per-capita basis. However, with the growth of the transnational Corporation many nations are being elevated if that's the appropriate way of putting it to the American level the development of direct broadcasting from satellites. TV signals from a Communications satellite beam directly into a home receiver without passing through any intermediary. We have not yet done this in any large-scale. It's been fun experiments early, but the technology now exists. That's just sending a message up from whatever the transmitter is too. That's not alike and have it come down in what would be calling enhanced receiver. That means it's just a little bit more capable of receiving a message without having to go through some Central Distribution Center that's direct satellite broadcasting and I might mention to you that direct satellite broadcast has created enormous apprehension is all over the rest of the world, but let me read through the years this the reaction to this possibility in the advertising community. The Tramadol J. Walter Thompson in Britain has this vision of the future for pan-european to television this on the basis of direct. Broadcasting from a satellite. I quote the chairman of J Walter Thompson, which happens to be the second or third largest advertising agency in the world? For the first time it would seem we can fulfil the multinationals corporate dream to establish at a single Moment In Time eyeball-to-eyeball interface is a beautiful expression eyeball-to-eyeball interface with the man in the street on a global scale what power what's savings what consistency what an opportunity so you can see a really very very happy nerve has been hit to those who thought the point of saturation had been reached in the United States. The projections of the advertising industry over the next 20 years and into the 21st century. Indicate how mistaken they are a tidal wave of commercialization. If the industry's expectations are to be taken at face value is still to come advertising age the Journal of the advertising industry foresees, a global advertising expenditure of 780 billion dollars in 2018 in comparison with 1980s 110 billion dollar outline other words in 20 years and fold increase With the United States moving from a current 55 billion dollar expenditure an advertising to a 320 big and expenditure by the year 2000. So if you still get some actual content when you flip the dial. Don't rely on that being maintained has an inevitable outcome of this goddamn to reinforce and extend already deep structures of individual private acquisitive and consumerist behavior is the weakening if not disappearance of publicly supported cultural activity public broadcasting for example, maybe in a terminal condition. This year 10 public television stations on the special Congressional authorization are going commercial. Unobtrusively. They are introducing quote clustered commercials at the beginning and end of their programs. Meanwhile, the public broadcasting system is moving forward with what it calls a public subscribe and network which does disservice to the word public. It is a plan to offer arts and culture to those who can pay for it estimated at about one and a quarter million high-income subscribe around the world under the same unrelenting pressures of transnational advertisers public systems of broadcasting are being dismantled. After all what publicly-financed system can withstand the challenge of advertising-supported in corporate finance program in the same combination of forces is affecting theater dance music and especially organized Sports. What are the effects of what? This has this account those ball. The massive privatization of the cultural communication sphere is an outgrowth of the enormously expanded influence of corporate business in America. Powerful transnational companies utilize the media for their direct and indirect messages also at their disposal is technology with the capability to profitly profitably generate process and disseminate information alongside these powerful Market forces the public informational cultural the main becomes ever more enfeebled. Does it matter If the material basis for communications and the Arts exists, does it make any difference where the support comes from? Does the origin of the results has affect the product? Is there anything inherently deleterious in this shift from public to privately paid for or assisted education Communications and culture? the answer at least in part. May be found in a recent comprehensive study generally favorable to corporate philanthropy and education and the Arts the author of the study asks himself this question. I quote should business support those who don't support the system. And he replies I get a quote. Corporations have no obligations to provide funds to organizations or individuals that are devoted to the replacement of our economic political and social system by some other system. This would be foolhardy looking at it from another Viewpoint. It is appropriate for corporations to provide support to worthwhile organizations that are proponents of the free enterprise system on the other hand. It is unwise for corporations to fund those who Wild Well, mow while well motivated would damage or destroy the system. They nominally support with reforms that are unworkable or unnecessary. Well, this is a good prescription for avoiding or eliminating diversity and critical thinking it is poor preparation for the problems and crises now upon us. Still there is sufficient evidence that this is precisely the Outlook of prevailing corporate Authority. Go foil, one of the patrons of public television advertise the program. It's sponsored with this headline quote We Believe television should command your attention quote to generate what it termed provocative golf collaborated with the National Geographic society and offered the viewing public an hour documentary recently on a polar bear alert. Follow the next month with an episode episode on the Thames. There is surely nothing basically objectionable and learning about polar bears or famous rivers. The unease arises when these Productions are described as provocative programming and receive priority in the allocation of resources. In the same way mobile also has been a benefactor of public television and other cultural media. Found it necessary to request the return of its contribution. A sum of $1,000 to the American Writers Congress in the fall of 1981 because according to mobiles Robert P maximum and I quote him the meeting was not directed at preserving the character in quality of our literary culture. It was a political platform to advance causes contrary to the fundamental ideals upon which America is based the political positions taken by the Congress are in an asthma and we disavow any association with them. I might mention that later along when this was published in publishes weekly of the same individual indicated. Well, we really won't ask for the thousand dollars back. We just wanted to indicate our disapproval the thousand dollars probably didn't suffice to buy bagels or pretzels for the three and a half thousand Riders who had participated The record could be added to at will. The decisive issue was not over its censorship by corporate free enterprise blue noses, though. Of course this occurs regularly. It is rather the creation of a cultural Communications atmosphere in which the dialogue is purged at the outset of critical discourse and a significant alternative formulations self-censorship becomes a built-in component in intellectual and creative work eventually. It enters into the mold of social existence. This is the production side of the process, but we have been describing on the consumer side that of the national public. Impacts are no less great and no less easily measurable. Navigating an immediate pervasive environment almost all of which is commercially saturated. The viewer listener reader is suffused with corporate ideology and is instructed day and night on the benefits of privatized Behavior. One prominent corporate supporter of the Arts emphasizes and again I quote. that bringing the Arts to the people is the core of the capitalist system quote perhaps More persuasive is the acknowledged corporate effort. To create for itself an aura of social responsibility and good citizenship. by contributing to National cultural activity David Rockefeller in 1966 in calling for a much larger role for business corporations in the Arts put it this way and I quote. It can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising a brighter public reputation and an improved corporate image. It can build better customer relations a ready acceptance of Company products and a superior appraisal of their quality promotion of the Arts can improve the morale of employees and help attract qualified personnel. Philip Morris Corporation a major contributed contributed to the nation's health problem as well as a generator of cultural pollution with its advertising at least has a chairman of the board. Mr. George Weisman, who is the chairman of the board has said and I quote. We are in an unpopular industry. While I was supported the Arts is not directed toward that problem. It has given us a better image in the financial and general Community then had we not done this. IBM's art benefactions are considered quote a great insurance policy one has to ask insurance against what were against who and who has failed to miss the greatly increased support from the Seven Sisters who dominate the international oil industry. Republic TV and related cultural events that coincided with the price gauging gouging and profit-taking accompanying the oil crisis in the 1970s through these initiatives are all well within familiar traditions of the American historical experience. What makes the current practices and institutional changes unique and dangerous are that they are deepening at an alarming rate the gulf between popular understanding and Global realities. An increasing number of Americans are being informed educated and entertained by corporate created or sponsored media and cultural programs and materials that exclude or minimize or misrepresent the great social conflicts of our time. And the near Global insistence on fundamental change in economic and cultural relationships. In this process the informational apparatus the Arts and the educational Enterprise are being locked into supporting or at least not confronting critically a system of transnational business and culture which is coming under scrutiny an attack almost everywhere else around the world. Communications and creativity in America in sharp contrast are being identified positively with corporate production and management. The many ways in which the information structure in the creative material that passes through it are being utilized a link directly to the private sector may be of assistance in the near-term and relieving pressure and diverting attention from the social issues that trouble people everywhere. In the long-term the efforts and outputs of the privatized cultural communication spheres will lose their credibility by their unwillingness or inability to illuminate the problems that Americans and everyone else are affected by still another problematic of the privatization of cultural informational activity is the tightening connection between the lodge professional and service labor force and the offerings of the cultural communication site. Generally, this is viewed as a positive development the visible evidence of a civilizing process, which is affecting a considerable part of the population. Who could have checked that the museums are overflowing with visitors? And high culture receives a viewing audience on TV of minions. No valid, this is an incomplete reading of current developments. It is also indicative of the application of salesmanship to the Arts and still more worrisome. Of the widening split in the National Community between an affluent and well-educated spread on stratum the informationally culturally and economically advantaged and an excluded relatively impoverished and Indigent grouping numerically large and getting larger. It is taken for granted. But computerization will be employed sooner or later in the production of all goods and services. It is anticipated also that in the years ahead the United States economy will function as an information center producing processing and disseminating data information knowledge at a price to the rest of the world. These developments that is also expected will be embodied in a new international division of labor. In which information production constitutes the pivotal element in a reconstructed international power hierarchy. You're all these expectations are based on the Assumption of a complacent World community acquiescing in the imposition of a global system in which old relationships of domination Independence are recast. But remained essentially on Alton can this be a realistic vision of the future? to the extent that the American economy as it is evolving does not secure a future dominant position in the international Arena the current expansion of the service Industries and the occupations. They support will come to a halt. The Information Society itself may be forced to take a different direction However, the international circumstances turn out hospitable or not to an American information Supremacy. A central dilemma still confronts the domestic economy and automated Information Society ultimately must be a high-output economy capable of greatly expanded physical production few workers will be required. Where will the workforce go? If the public sector cannot be called upon where will work is be absorbed. The service and information Industries are precisely the areas of activity that depend on the maintenance of a global system of transnational business and the domestic economy that lives off of it. Life expectancy of these worldwide Arrangements is uncertain at best. And if there are no new private-sector jobs, will there then be a massive transfer of purchasing power? The tens of millions of non-working Americans to sustain national production levels to say nothing of the minimum standard of living. Do the lyrics of the Dead Kennedy rock group who sing kill the poor foretell the future quote a stanza from that group's song. The sun beams down on a brand new day no more welfare tax to pay unsightly slums going up in flashing light jobless minions with the way at least we have more room to play all systems. Go to kill the poor tonight going to kill kill kill kill kill the poor tonight. I might interject here that I find it very very curious that some of the wisdom that we might be receiving is not coming in our University classrooms off from our political leadership, but from some of these groups that are regarded as absolutely outside the pale of civilization For a very long time we have known but not admitted that what is needed desperately in the country is an expansion actually an explosion of Human Services educational Health cultural social and related. It is a feat of wild imagination to see these created in a private context Human Services are the quintessential social expressions of community. Unhappily, it is the private envelopment of the communications cultural sector that severely limits practically excludes public knowledge ability and open debate of these issues the agendas of the major political parties avoid these subjects public discussion is practically non-existent. The proposals for coping with the present still relatively manageable economic crisis. Leaving aside the crises still ahead. apathetic the most Elementary in basic questions of political economy or ignored for fear of contradicting the tenants of privatism. Perhaps social Solutions hardly can be expected to be formulated much less implemented when people have been systematically privatized in their physical spiritual spatial and cultural lives. But why privatization accelerates so do the social breakdowns at home and abroad? These aren't true despite considerable efforts to contain and Screen them out of popular where awareness. for the fact of the matter is the private sector comprised of Divergent interests is unable to administer much less coordinate the national economy, especially in a. Of increasing General turbulence. The situation already has become bizarre a crumbling public sector was discouraged supporters and a private sector with rival groupings and continuous battle. Actually, the antagonistic and conflictive activity inside the private corporate sector prevent for the moment at least the full force of privatization from being experienced throughout the social Realm. Where the private sector disagreements can be roughly up be relied upon to protect the common interest in the long-term. Is quite another matter. The pressure of intensifying economic and social crisis more likely will compel the beleaguered system to find increasing attraction in a command economy in which the orders come from the most powerful private Commanders. The communications cultural sphere would be the first focus of attention and direct intervention you across and here again, I interpolate are certainly aware of recent history of the last two decades that each time there is a turn off whatever the source of the crisis is and it intensifies there is as great a pressure on control of and one way or another of maintaining the lid on whatever discussion of the issues that exists and we are seeing that again at this time. All the prospects are also imaginable. Whatever the direction taken domestically and however powerful the impact of American action or inaction is on the International Community the United States contains. only about 5% of the world's population the aspirations and efforts of the full big and others the 95% are not without great and growing affect in America. a clear-sighted view of the future therefore requires that the field of vision include developments that occur in the Region's and among the peoples that for many centuries is considered a tall are regarded as background for a few leading national players. Today there are scores of new historical actors whose voices are being and will be heard and who's the man's will surely contribute to the difficulties of the American transnational business system. Here at home the crisis conditions that Propel political coordination and unification in the private sector. Anolis capable of exerting comprable influence on presently atomized public constituencies. The tightly concentrated information system for a variety of reasons already has from innumerable leaks and seepages. The remarkable statement last March of an obscure, Pennsylvania and Republican member of the House of Representatives. Who invented silent follower of his party in the governing Administration? Suggest that the popular yearning for social justice and UMaine governance still runs deep in the Republic. In his comprehensive indictment of the policy of the present government Congressman Mark Lincoln Mark stole his colleagues and I'm quoting just two or three sentences from a very very comprehensive speech government does things that are worthwhile low excesses will and have always occurred those words government of the People by the people and for the people are not merely rhetoric their meaningful perhaps more today than ever it is the height of the responsibility on all pot. Substitute permit the new ride the all right or the always right to erase those words or water down there meaning. Privatization has moved ahead steadily. But there's some life left in the notion of the public interest. Still another significant indication of the alarm and concern present policies are creating. Is the joint Declaration of for former High governmental policy making individuals McGeorge Bundy George Kennan, Robert McNamara and Gerard Smith against continuing to rely on the nuclear war option. These developments appear more political and cultural but they Collide by directly with the drive to a total privatization. Stopping the ward juggin what requires public mobilization and restores fundamental social issues to a high place on the national agenda? It is moving to the rim of the Abyss. To put hope in the intensification of unbearable crisis. But it seems are a few if any alternatives. The sense in pursuit of community have been so badly undermined are recaptured requires a momentous reversal in socio-political Direction. Under whose auspices this reconstitution will occur. If indeed it does is the all-embracing issue in the time ahead. Thank you.