SNIP
>>Yup. School does it's part and the media takes care of the rest.
>>You noted earlier that because of work people 'over there' demonstrated in the evening. Here, of course, evenings are reserved for "quality time with the kids" and to infringe on that is to make one a bad parent.
>
>In this case, I went with the kids. Our little daughter, who was about four at the time, still remembers the water someone spilled over our heads from the 4th floor. About 100m later, when the word about this spread, we all returned to that place and called the guy out. The water was actually warm (it was January, cold would have been worse), so we shouted at the guy "what are you doing washing dishes at this time, go watch your pharoah's TV".

I doubt that you'd see that here (any more). Geez, my daughter doesn't permit talk of anything in the least bit 'unhappy' around my grand daughter, so I can't imagine her taking her to a demonstration. I have no idea where my daughter came by this, except for school and the media.

>
SNIP
>>There is consistently common thread in news/talk/advertising media lasting weeks at a time. A concerted effort by some power somewhere to 'sell' something, be it a product or a point of view. The media, by and large, maynot even know that they are pawns in many of these conspiracies. They've cut budgets and, with present school training, short-cuts like press releases or canned video that's a commercial in disguise is too tempting. Don't THINK about the content - just fill some space with my name in the by-line.
>
>The need to fill the space and sell it has gone way beyond common sense. What's the purpose of advertising tomorrow's news? They won't be new tomorrow. There are actually no news on regular commercial channels - or at least I can't watch them. They're so interspersed with commercials, that I lose my patience halfway between the announcement ("and we'll see how this happened after these messages") and the actual news. And then, as you say, the imposed threads are just sales pitches, most of the time, or just distractions, to keep people's minds away from the real issues.
>
>Take the Enron case - all we hear is the dispute about the accounting practice, people losing their retirements/savings/stock, but I haven't heard a single word on what actually happened to those 200+ offshore companies, what were they doing, what happened to the money invested in them, who owes them money and who owns the debtors. Looks like a great scam to get the money out of the country, and the focus always seems to be on the magician's wrong hand.

This all went down at the end of Nov/beginning of Dec and it took how long for it to even make the media????
And there is far more than just the employees who are out millions. Virtually every pension plan had big money in there.
And yes, that offshore stuff will really stink when it is all clear.

>
>>"Globalization" seems at odds with the ongoing (still, I believe) push by different cultural groups around the world to stake out their own territory. Like Quebec or Northern Ireland or Kosovo or Iraq or East Timor or.... (lots in Russia, Africa, Asia). These seem to want to shrink themselves rather than globalize themselves.
>
>They suffer from media manipulation as well. They are led to think that breaking free from their local (perceived) masters will really set them free, while they're really running into the lion's mouth - the areas devastated by yesterday's wars are today's free hunting grounds for the globalization missionaries. Guess who's looking for oil in Bosnia or which companies are doing construction work in Kosovo. Not local companies, not at all.
>
>>The money, of course, only sees that it can pay much lower wages and crap all over the local environment, all the while leaving local labour laws alone
>
>Nope, IMF (plus WTO plus World Bank) force the local labour legislature to conform to their standards.

That may be so, where the WTO operates. But they don't in China or several other places.

SNIP