THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

For American professors and for the American East Coast, "international" means "sophisticated." They regard Middle America and the South as "fly-over country" on their way to the West Coast. As Martin Sheen and a host of other Hollywood celebrities have pointed out, America has never produced anything important.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is such a hopeless bureaucracy that it embarrasses some third world countries. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is repeatedly caught taking bribes to locate the Olympics in some particular city, and the fix was just in - AGAIN - on the figure skating championships.

Naturally, the Hollywood stars and professors and easterners explain that any problem foreigners have is because they are misunderstood or the world is just unfair to them. Professors tell us over and over and over that if the world would just turn all economic planning over to the professors, everybody would be rich.

This is what they call 'socialism," but it is really just rule by professors.

There have been actual recordings of Olympic judges putting in the fix, but nothing could be done about it. Like United Nations bureaucrats, these people simply cannot be gotten rid of. That is the nature of the bureaucracies in most third world countries and in Europe today, where there is a permanent depression going on.