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Bring Back the Fairness Doctrine
By Donella Meadows
–November 12, 1987–
The Fairness Doctrine is gone.
Most people don’t even know for sure what the Fairness Doctrine was, much less that it has been repealed, or why they should care. It’s easier than you might expect to strip away democratic rights from the public without even raising a fuss.
The Fairness Doctrine is best explained by telling a few [...]
The Stock Market Crash — Layers of Causes
By Donella Meadows
–November 12, 1987–
By now we’ve heard hundreds of theories about The Cause of the stock market crash. It was the greed of the yuppies that did it, or the German mark, or the August trade balance. It was program trading. It was the government deficit.
We love single, simple causes, though we know that in this complex world causation [...]
A Nobel Peace Prize for Costa Rica
By Donella Meadows
–November 5, 1987–
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has a way of using the prize itself to strengthen ongoing peace efforts. That is one reason why it awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize for Peace to Oscar Arias Sanchez, the President of Costa Rica.
Arias is the force behind the difficult, daring peace agreement now being worked out among the nations [...]
The Stock Market Is Not the Economy
By Donella Meadows
–October 29, 1987–
“Everyone is a little puzzled,” said President Reagan on the day the Dow dropped 508 points. “I don’t know what meaning it might have, because all the business indicators are up.”
It was an appropriate statement for a President, an administration, and a decade that have consistently confused indicators with reality, the appearance of leadership with actual [...]
Prophets of Depression Are Without Honor in Any Country
By Donella Meadows
–October 22, 1987–
Back in the booming 1920s, when Wall Street was the glamor capital of the world, when the rich were getting much richer and the poor were invisible, when a conservative government was cutting taxes, when people were inventing ingenious ways to spend money they didn’t have, and when the only conceivable direction was up, one person [...]
