A Timeline of Certain Events
- November/December, 2000
- Election of George W. Bush: A Farce of Democracy and
Justice
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and
personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce."
Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852-18b/ch01.htm
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- September 28, 2000
- Amazon.com caught for "dynamic pricing" by users of the
DVDTalk.com discussion group. Dynamic pricing is a scheme whereby Amazon
reads "cookies" it plants on customer's computers so it can charge
HIGHER prices to regular customers who trust Amazon to continue the low
prices it offers to acquire new customers. Apparently, there is no law
against this deceptive practice. (Reported by Washington Post, "Amazon
Flunks Its Pricing Test".)
- September 18, 2000
- TechWeek publishes six letters to the editor exposing unethical and
illegal actions by Pacific Bell, including the complain of yours truly,
Thomas Albert.
http://www.techweek.com/articles/9-18-00/feedback.htm
- September 12, 2000
- "Activists sue BART over snub of spending ads". Transportation
Displays Inc., the agency that sells ads for BART officials, claimed it is
against their policy to show weapons in an advertisement. The agency used
this excuse to block ads by the California Peace Action Fund that compared
the education and defense budgets with photos of a new missile and a
run-down Oakland school. However, the agency's claim to have a policy
against showing weapons contradicts their approval of ads showing weapons
for the latest James Bond movie, and for Lockheed Martin's F-22 fighter jet.
(San Francisco Examiner, A-5.)
- September 12, 2000
- George W. Bush's Republican National Committee's TV ad against democrats
flashes DemocRATS. Bush denies any subliminal manipulation of the public to
associate democrats with RATS, yet withdraws the ad.
- June 6, 2000
- Texas Governor George Bush, who has already put 131 death row inmates to
death, defends the 1983 capital punishment conviction of Calvin J. Burdin
even though the Texas attorney general's office admit that the lawyer
appointed to defend Burdin, Joe Frank Cannon, "repeatedly slept through
parts of the trial." The State of Texas maintains that the burden
of proof lies with the defendant, thereby eroding the fundamental principle
of "innocent until proven guilty". How could a defendant too poor
to hire an attorney hope represent the wisdom that his sleeping lawyer
failed to have? That this story appears as a minor sideline on page A6 of
the June 6, 2000 San Francisco Chronicle demonstrates that no only is
justice dead, so is the public's compassion for the victims of the state's
killing apparatus. 81% of the human executions perpetrated by this country
occur in the former slave-holding states of the southern Confederacy: http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/1998/12/14/p3s1.htm
Mr. Bush, our next President, subscribes to a sanitized form of
lynching.
- July 4, 2000
- Paradoxically, on July 4, 2000 a former Coca-Cola executive, Vicente Fox,
defeated the 71-year old ruling party of Mexico. While folks in the U.S.
celebrated independence from Britain, the North American Free Trade
Agreement completed its absorption of North America.
- 1920
- Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled that the Coca-Cola
Company had the right to exclusive trademark. The Koke Company of America
lost its argument that the name Coca-Cola had become a fraudulent when the
Coca-Cola Company obeyed the Food and Drug Act of June 30, 1906 and ceased
to include cocaine in the beverage. ("Until 1903, the amount of active
cocaine in each bottle of Coke was equivalent to one 'line' of
cocaine.") Justice Holmes wrote that by 1920 only "an ignorant
person might call for the drink with the hope for incipient cocaine
intoxication." Today, most people are ignorant of Coca-Cola's narcotic
heritage. Among those ignorant folk are victims of today's Classic Coke
caffeine addiction. What I find to be pivotal in this case is the power the
Supreme Court granted to a new institution: advertising. In the Roaring
Twenties, business acquired free reign to propagate profit even if it
misrepresented truth.