burden of waste, but also technological change. Tech change contributed to those decentralizing trends that have undercut bureaucracy and monolithic organizations everywhereone of the main causes of the decline of state socialism. There can be no doubt that Fordist command-and-control had its problems, and that its requirements could sometimes be expensive and inefficient. But many of its corporate critics and affiliated media and academia have argued that this constitutes a failure of regulation per se. They call for a return to unconscious market forces. Many of these critics, however, appear to be motivated more by another trend in industrial development that is consistently and often deliberately confused with postindustrial decentralization: economic globalization and the insistent push of corporations for freedom from social, environmental and political accountability. This push has been made possible by the global extension of production and consumption loops, undermining many of managerial devices of national states. The information revolution has also spawned a giant new international financial economy that has also undercut governments ability to regulate investment. Corporations see an opening and are using it to reduce (or even eliminate) values other than those of accumulation in the modern economy, a phenomenon known as neo-liberalism. Despite the fact that both the technological capacity and the social movements for democracy are growing, potentials for decentralization are actually being used to erode democracy and accountability. Instead of broadening the scope for social and ecological values in the economy, states are being forced to abandon non-monetary values to pure (accumulationist) market values. And organizationally, governments are being pressured into supporting ever more extended economic loops, instead of closing them. Not only is