Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television

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What was true for farmers was true for all business as the rapid-growth phenomenon gave automatic advantage to the larger, better-financed, more technologically advanced elements of the system.

Smaller competitors were driven from competition by the mere scale of the expenditure required at every level, from the cost of automation to the salaries of ' executives to the availability of bank loans. Banks, recognizing very early that large companies are better loan risks than small ones, actively aided the, advancing juggernaut. Smaller companies were wise to face the fact that it was usually better to sell out before things got worse.

Nowhere were the advantages of size more evident than in advertising. Only the largest corporations in the world have access to network television time j because it can cost $120,000 per minute while reaching 30 million people. Television is the media counterpart to the eight-row corn harvester.

The Effect on Individuals

It was not only abstract entities like corporations that benefited disproportionately during the commodity boom. So did the people who owned the corporations.

Dr. Lester C. Thurow, professor of economics and management at MIT and former member of the Council of Economic Advisors, published some enlightening figures in the Public Interest Economics Newsletter of December 1975.

By 1962, says Thurow, during the final spurt of the greatest economic growth of any industrial nation in history: "The top 18 percent of all families owned 76.2 percent of all privately held wealth in the U.S., while the bottom 25 percent, roughly 50 million people, had no assets at all .... recent estimates suggest no significant change. . ."'

Thurow continues: "The top 5 percent of the families own more wealth than the bottom 81 percent. The top .008 percent hold as many assets as the bottom half of the population."

Thurow goes on to say that "wealth and power are even more concentrated than are indicated in these data, because of the interrelationships among the wealthiest individuals and the large corporations they control."

In other words, this .008 percent can, through their stock ownership and interlocking directorships, effectively dominate the few corporations that in turn dominate the economy.

I believe Thurow is suggesting conspiracy, or at least a startling degree of collaboration among these few. Perhaps his academic standing prevents him from putting it that way. Since I don't have any academic standing, I am willing to draw the obvious conclusions.

Thurow goes on to talk about income: "The income gap between the bottom 5 percent [of the families] and the top 5 percent is 45 to 1, and the income gap between the bottom 1 percent and top 1 percent is 525 to 1. The top 1 percent received nearly three times as much income annually as the bottom 20 percent of the American population. The fact that only the government transfer payments [social security, welfare, food stamps] have kept the position of the lowest income groups from declining, indicates that the distribution of earnings by the private sector is becoming more and more unequal .... The lowest fifth of the population receives only 1.7 percent of the earnings as distributed by the market [private industry], down from the already miserable 0.6 percent in 1943. The top fifth receives through the market 28 times as much in wages and salaries as the lowest fifth."

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