Commentary
In late January, Norwegian police raided the home of a 16-year-old student who rattled the U.S. movie industry with a software program he co-authored that breaks the security code on DVDs, the latest generation of video players. Jon Johansen, who hails from Larvik, Norway, had posted the program on his father’s company Web site, and it quickly spread like wildfire across the Internet. The son and his father, Per Johansen, face up to three years in prison and stiff fines if convicted.
Only one week earlier a freshly launched Canadian Web site called iCraveTV was hit with strong legal action initiated by an alliance of U.S.-based movie studios, TV networks, and sports leagues. iCraveTV is one of the first Web sites to broadcast complete TV signals over the Internet, showing uncut, uninterrupted streams of 17 broadcast television stations from the United States and Canada.
Under Canadian law, such rebroadcasting is apparently legal, at least for cable and satellite broadcasters. iCraveTV claims the Net is just like cable and that it, too, should have the right to offer TV. As far as the U.S. broadcasters are concerned, it’s blatant copyright infringement, and they aimed to make a legal example of iCraveTV to dissuade copycats. In late February iCraveTV settled the lawsuit by agreeing to stop rebroadcasting TV programming, at least for the time being.
"This kind of cyberspace stealing must be stopped, wherever it occurs, because it violates the principles of U.S. copyright law," Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) chief executive Jack Valenti said following the iCraveTV lawsuit, a message he repeated nearly verbatim a week after Johansen’s arrest.
Travel the world over and American-generated advertising frames your view. McDonald’s, Coca Cola, AT&T, in billboard and signs, block skylines and provide ready landmarks with only slight modifications to reflect the local culture.
We the people of the United States of America are exporters of image. It is crucial to our identity. Even in radical countercultural circles, we know ourselves best when bemoaning uniquely horrific corporate American crassness—Rain Forest denizens watching Bay Watch, General Foods pimping mac and cheese to Latin American beans-and-rice connoisseurs, Kate Moss pushing voluntary starvation, even dot.com anti-advertising advertising.
So it’s jarring when some foreigner socks us in our cultural gut by turning our primary civic language against us. United Colors of Benetton—the Italian clothing company—has, for the last decade, been doing just that. Oliviero Toscani, the company’s advertising director and publicist, has brought to our billboards multicolored copulating horses, Ronald Reagan in the advanced stages of AIDS, a crucified Jesus with "Do You Play Alone?" stamped across the width. These thumb-waves at our prudish American sensibilities have incensed the Catholic League, AIDS activists, and people of good taste, most of whom have never seen (let alone purchased) a Benetton sweater or suit.
Benetton’s latest import is "We, On Death Row," a $15 million dollar print and billboard campaign. The centerpiece, a 96-page outsert bound with the February 2000 issue of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine (of which Toscani is creative director), profiles 25 men and one woman living on death row in the United States.
Jose Montenegro grew up on a small farm in Durango, Mexico—a farm his father still owns and manages. Today Montenegro is director of the Rural Development Center in Salinas, California, providing training for migrant farm workers to become independent farmers. "There is this passion, this love, that Mexican people have for the land that goes way back to our ancestors," Montenegro says. "When I came [to the United States] I worked in factories, but I was looking for a commitment, not just a job."
The Rural Development Center opened its doors in the 1980s to address an unrecognized statistic. While California’s "traditional" family farms—run by the descendents of European immigrants—were on the decline, between 1992 and 1997 there was a 32 percent increase in Latino farm owners.
The same statistics are turning up around the country for "nontraditional" and "new entry" farmers. Nearly 9 percent of U.S. farms are owned and operated by women. The percentage of black-owned farms is also on the rise, due in part to the 1997 discrimination suit black farmers won against the USDA. There is a nationwide increase in small farms owned or operated by American Indians, Latinos, and Asians.
The USDA’s National Commission on Small Farms is changing the climate for small farm owners. The Ag Department’s Civil Rights Action Team recommended formation of the commission after it was recognized that, in addition to racial discrimination, government policies and practices have discriminated against small farm operators.
Like the Titanic speeding toward that fateful iceberg, the United States is heading toward disaster. The impending decision to deploy national missile defenses could significantly increase nuclear dangers, undermining the foundations of arms control and provoking military countermeasures from Russia and China.
Building a defense against ballistic missiles has been a chimera of Republican orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan proposed a Star Wars shield during the 1980s to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The current missile defense plan has a more limited design: to parry missiles from so-called rogue nations. The goal is no longer to fend off thousands of Russian warheads but to counter limited attack from North Korea, Iran, or other imagined foes. The Clinton administration has endorsed the Republican plan and has vowed to make a deployment decision this summer.
Despite the expenditure of more than $60 billion over the past 15 years (spending in 2000 will total $4 billion), the missile defense establishment has yet to produce a single piece of hardware with a proven ability to knock out long range missiles. All the tests for the system have been either complete failures or partial successes that were performed under highly controlled conditions unlikely to exist in the event of an actual missile attack. Even the Pentagon’s own review panel, headed by retired Air Force Gen. Lawrence Welch, has admitted that the technology for national missile defense does not yet exist and termed the drive for rapid development a "rush to failure."
Flawed tests are no obstacle to missile defense zealots in Congress, however. When the latest interceptor missed its target over the Pacific in January 2000, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott blithely brushed aside the failure and ruled out any delay.
There are currently about 900 genetic tests available. They can be helpful to understand, plan for, prevent, or treat genetically related conditions. With the approaching introduction of "gene chip" technology (which enables biologists to scour huge chunks of genomes in search of the genes that promote disease), large numbers of genetic tests are likely to become quick, relatively inexpensive, and routine.
Such accessible genetic information has many implications. One crucial area is that of employment.
Popular fears have been expressed in novels and movies that employers will use these genetic tests to choose employees not for their ability but for their genetic potential. If the employers did so, they would be misunderstanding human genetics. Human beings are so complex that a rich genetic endowment can be unfulfilled and a relatively poor one can be substantially transcended. Companies seeking to predict future performance would do far better to look at past performance and current-ability-based tests than to look at genetic heritage.
Employers are likely to try to use genetic tests to limit what they spend on medical care. To survive long term, businesses depend on producing more revenue than they consume, either by raising income or reducing expenses. Medical care is often a major factor in company costs.
Most employees in the United States are covered by company self insurance. Many of the others are under experience-based policies where a company’s premium changes with how much medical care employees need. In either case, medical care for employees and their dependents is a significant part of the employer’s outlays. Awareness of this impact is heightened for management by the concentration of medical care expenses in one subset of employees. In any given year, 5 percent of employees incur about 50 percent of health care expenditures, and 10 percent need about 70 percent of these resources.
The current debate about trade with China is a perfect illustration of the double standards (and double talk) that permeate U.S. foreign policy. The Clinton administration wants to end the annual review of China’s trade status, arguing that increased business relations will improve human rights in the communist nation.
The administration, of course, makes exactly the opposite argument when it comes to Cuba, for which the U.S. government has nothing but contempt and economic sanctions, at least as long as Castro is in power and Cuban expatriates carry such weight in Florida politics (and presidential primaries).
But China is a special case, not the least because of its sheer size. The business community drools over the prospect of all those new customers. One only has to imagine the captains of industry humming their mantra—"a billion Cokes a day"—to see why U.S. business consortiums are lobbying so hard to opening China’s door to international commerce.
China currently enjoys "normal trade relations" (which used to be called "most favored nation" status) with the United States. But each year, that status comes up for congressional renewal. In one of those lovely quirks of timing, the annual review coincides with the anniversary of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, thus providing the opportunity for an annual discussion and debate centered (usually) on human rights and not just dollars-and-cents.