In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade."

The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

The "cumulative effects" of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to assess, constitute one key to the impact of growing up in the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests unpreparedness for, and lack of interest in, the world that exists outside the shopping mall.

For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.

With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested.

Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage - for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.