There’s a documentary drama on the UK’s Channel 4 tomorrow night at 9 PM, telling the story of Thomas Hurndall’s murder by an Israeli sniper, and his family’s fight to uncover the truth.
I met Tom on the human shield action to Iraq in 2003. He left Iraq when war became inevitable and travelled on to Gaza where he was eventually shot in the head by Hayb, an award-winning Israeli marksman, while trying to save Palestinian children who were having pot shots fired around them by Israeli snipers.
From his diary:
What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want to be proud of myself. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven’t done.
External links:
One of the most anti-democratic and destabilising features of global capitalism is the lack of control governments have over the flow of capital and corporations; capital and corporations freely move to wherever profits are highest, costs are lowest and governments are most fearful of the way global markets will react to their policies.
So if the people of a country happen to vote in a government that implements policies largely for the benefit of the people rather than largely for the benefit of private investors and their profits, market traders will move capital to some other economy offering an environment more conducive to “business needs,” in the process inflicting devaluation, inflation and unemployment. Government policy, therefore, ends up being formulated under a grotesque framework whereby profits are sacrosanct, trumping all other considerations.
The assumption underlying all this is that the market knows best, probably one of the most damaging of ideas of our time. In fact so damaging that it could render the planet uninhabitable.
Noam Chomsky has a piece in the Irish Times today that goes into a little of the history of this in light of current events. Here’s a little taste:
Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky
Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.
External links:
Participatory economics, an economy proposed as an alternative to contemporary capitalism.
]]>Bob Herbert, for the New York Times:
]]>I don’t for a moment think that the Democratic Party has been free of egregious problems. But there are two things I find remarkable about the G.O.P., and especially its more conservative wing, which is now about all there is.
The first is how wrong conservative Republicans have been on so many profoundly important matters for so many years. The second is how the G.O.P. has nevertheless been able to persuade so many voters of modest means that its wrongheaded, favor-the-rich, country-be-damned approach was not only good for working Americans, but was the patriotic way to go.
Julia Finch, for the Guardian:
Huge bonuses for City high flyers will be hard to rein in
Michael Collins on Scoop:
]]>A little something to make you laugh. I’ve seen some cringe-inducing videos from Microsoft over the years but this one, promoting their Professional Developers Conference, may take the cake. (via Daring Fireball)
Surely they have highly paid propagandists who said, no, bad idea? Maybe their cringe-loving CEO, Steve Ballmer, thought it would be a good idea.
]]>]]>Espiner agrees that the election is now all about trust, but he characterises it as trust in economic management. I’d characterise it differently. Recessions aren’t about poor macroeconomic statistics, but about people - people who are going to lose their jobs, and need to fall back on the state in their time of need. The question then is who do we trust to care for the victims (remembering that any of us could end up as one of them), minimise the damage, and ensure they can get on with their lives when the economy picks up again? The people who slashed welfare benefits? Or the people who have maintained them? The people who slashed health spending? Or the people who have expanded it? The people who don’t care about the poor? Or the people who do?
Chomsky speaking at the Social Summit in Venezuela a couple of weeks ago.
How many anti-capitalist climate change deniers do you know? Do they even exist? I presume there are at least some out there but the only deniers I personally know are also ardent advocates of market economics. Go through a list of prominent sceptics and you also invariably find within it a little club of market economy advocates.
Maybe they subconsciously realise what many don’t want to talk about; that climate change has happened under the market economy’s watch.
]]>U.S. to Fund Pro-American Publicity in Iraqi Media
The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to “engage and inspire” the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government.
I love how they refer to it as “Pro-American Publicity.”
]]>Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzalez:
The Obama and McCain campaigns jointly negotiated a detailed contract dictating the terms of all the 2008 debates. This includes who gets to participate as well as the topics raised during the debates. But the contract remains secret and the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private corporation created by the two major parties, has refused to release the contract to the public.
Another feather in the cap of U.S. “democracy.”
]]>Many of you will know I’m not exactly a fan of the market economy. In fact I think, one day, it may come to be known as the single worst invention humans have devised. And one area where it does the most damage is the mainstream media.
I’ve had arguments with newspaper editors and other commentators about the homogenisation of discourse in the mainstream media and invariably I’m accused of proffering conspiracy theories. While I have nothing against the proffering of conspiracy theories you don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain the filtering that takes place in the media. People get to their positions for many reasons but one reason you’ll find pervasive in the mainstream media is passive agreement of the idea that profits are largely sacrosanct. Challenge this idea in any significant way and won’t find yourself part of the mainstream media. It ends up framing our entire discourse.
Check out the latest on this from Media Lens: Intellectual Cleansing: Part 1, Keeping The Media Safe For Big Business
]]>Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains why he thinks the management of some of the closed aspects of Apple’s iPhone App Store are flawed.
And if that interests you, you might also be interested in this interview with Jonathan Zittrain and a review of his new book, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It.
]]>No Right Turn on the NZ National Party’s plans to gut the Resource Management Act, and take NZ back to the Muldoon years:
]]>How would National change this? Firstly, they would amend the definition of “environment” to include only “natural and physical resources” - so existing rights to amenity values such as peace and quiet, clean air, clean water, or an unimpeded view would cease to exist, while local bodies could no longer seek to protect their social environment by considering e.g. the effects of traffic, or the effects of visual pollution from excessive advertising. Secondly, they would aim to prevent “vexatious and frivolous” objections by allowing the Environment Court to require security for costs before considering any appeal (so no appeals unless you are rich like them). Thirdly, they would replace the existing call in power with a more regularly used “priority consenting” regime, which would see decisions made by a government body rather than an independent board. There’s some other nastiness - removing the Ministerial veto over coastal permits (so effectively the crown won’t own the coast anymore in any practical sense), and establishing an “Environmental Protection Agency” as cover for purging MfE (who National doesn’t trust) - but the driving principle is to shut local communities out of decision making, and prevent anyone - unless they are rich, of course - from mounting any challenge. And the net result will be open slather for developers, and large projects foisted on local communities, just like they were under Muldoon.
I never used to like Jamie Oliver’s TV programs. I thought he was a pompous git. I warmed up to him, however, with his Jamie at Home series, with all its home cooking and gardening.
Then, Tuesday night, came his latest big idea, Jamie’s Ministry of Food. It was some of the most intriguing political documentary I’ve seen on British TV: a millionaire cook from London in his expensive Jeep bumping up against the grinding reality of British people in poverty and their diets.
It seems to have everybody talking. Unfortunately, from my discussions with people, the Thatcherite/Blairite idea that it’s all about choice is alive and kicking. Not only does this belie the hard facts and statistics about been born into poverty, but it’s also not even necessarily rational (make sure to read the whole piece):
Elizabeth Dowler, professor of food and social policy at Warwick University who was recently involved in the government’s Low Income Diet and Nutrition survey, says the class differences are stark but complicated. “If you live for more than six months on the minimum wage or on benefits there is growing evidence you cannot afford to buy the food you need for health. It is still to do with class but it’s complex to unpick. Food is the flexible area that you cut back on when you are on a low income. Unlike council tax or utility bills, no one fines you if you don’t spend on food and no one takes your children away, so that’s what you cut, and you have a fag because that takes the hunger away.”
When you are on a low income you buy the kind of food that fills you up most cheaply. What may seem ignorant choices to others are in fact quite rational. Lobstein has calculated the cost of 100 calories of food energy from different types of food. The cheapest way to get your 100 calories is to buy fats, processed starches and sugars. A hundred calories of broccoli costs 51p, but 100 calories of frozen chips only cost 2p. Good-quality sausages that are high in meat but low in fat cost 22p per 100 calories, but “value” fatty ones are only 4p per 100 calories. Poor quality-fish fingers are 12p per 100 calories compared with 29p for ones made with fish fillet that are higher in nutrients. Fresh orange juice costs 38p per 100 calories, while the same dose of energy from sugary orange squash costs 5p.
Something that’s fascinated me as I’ve earned increasingly more over the years is how it gets more and more difficult to remember what it’s like not to earn money. You start doing things you swore you’d never do, such as forget that some of those you’ve got out for dinner with don’t necessarily have the same budget as you.
It will interesting to see where this program goes. Will it turn into a nasty reality TV show or will Oliver continue his journey towards the understanding that it’s not simply about “choice.”
External links:
Update, 4 October 2008: External links added.
]]>The free market preachers have long practised state welfare for the rich.
Bailing out banks seems unprecedented, but the US government’s form in subsidising big business is well established.
What an emergency economic plan might look like if the U.S. was a real democracy.
Will Wall Street’s Meltdown Turn America Into a Police State?
]]>I‘m not much of an Army Times reader, but after reading that a brigade was shipping from Iraq in October to serve as “an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks” in the homeland right before the election, my antennae perked up.
Outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, recently quoted as saying:
(I am saying) what no previous Israeli leader has ever said: we should withdraw from almost all of the territories, including in East Jerusalem and in the Golan Heights.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki, in response:
We wish we had heard this personal opinion … (before) he resigned.
No shit. But this all pre-supposes the dead end that is the two-state solution. As Ghada Karmi wrote last week in The Guardian:
]]>A unitary state is inevitable. Establishing an exclusive state defined along ethnic-religious lines and excluding its previous inhabitants was unjust and ultimately unsustainable. No political acrobatics will alter this. The sooner the UN, which unwisely created Israel in the first place, takes charge of the consequences, the better it will be for Palestinians, for Israelis and for the region as a whole.
Interview with economist Dr. Michael Hudson on the proposed $700 billion heist in the U.S.
BASILONE: So this neoliberal economic model, then, is this proof that it doesn’t work? Or are we going to still see more of this?
HUDSON: To its proponents it’s not proof, they’ll never admit it. It’s a demonstration of the impossibility of the magic of compound interest doubling and redoubling the volume of debt, and trying to pay retirement savings and pension funds, and making people rich by continually doubling the amount of debt in the economy. This is a crazy way. No other economy in history has ever got rich off debt, and this economy can’t either.
BASILONE: So it’s a pyramid scheme.
HUDSON: Yes.
]]>He calls himself a maverick, but he’s just a bullshitter (via onegoodmove).
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This, presumably, is why they’ve been trying to keep her away from the media.
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Sometimes nothing explains current events like satire: Your Urgent Help Needed.
]]>Bush Junior at today’s UN meeting invoking, I kid you not, the UN Charter:
The United Nations charter sets forth the equal rights of nations large and small. Russia’s invasion of Georgia was a violation of those words.
Bwahhh… haha! He’s not seriously suggesting that UN bollocks about justice means anything these days is he?
]]>A rather unsettling story from the Independent today:
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species.
I find it incredible that we’ve allowed ourselves to get to this point while continuing to use the same bankrupt ideas, the same leadership and the same greed-fueled economic system that got us here in the first place.
]]>For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.
]]>For years we heard the same old story about how there’s never any money for a liveable benefits system or a decent minimum wage, but somehow UK plc finds billions of spare cash to support corrupt businesses that are in a mess only because of a greed that has benefited no one but their shareholders. For years we’ve heard the mantra that the free market must be allowed to run unfettered – yet the most ‘capitalist’ governments are nationalising huge companies left, right and centre. It just goes to show that capitalism is a myth and the sooner we stop wasting money propping up a failed system that will never work - the better.
A pediatrician traces the rise of the anti-vaccine movement that falsely linked thimerosal with autism and turned parents away from the most lifesaving medicine in history.
Wakefield’s research was secretly bankrolled by a personal injury lawyer whose clients were suing MMR makers. Wakefield himself was given close to a million dollars to prove that the MMR caused autism. He had filed a patent for a new MMR vaccine at the same time he was doing his research. Upon learning this, Lancet retracted his paper, and he was charged with professional misconduct in 2005. If he is found guilty of misconduct, he will never practice medicine in the U.K. again.
The last nail in the coffin came in 2007 … Wakefield’s former research assistant testified that his discovery about the MMR vaccine was, in reality, the result of contaminated lab equipment and that Wakefield knew this about but ignored it. In other words, as Offit writes, “Wakefield had crossed the line from ill-conceived, poorly performed science to fraud.”
Eleven studies now show that the MMR vaccine doesn’t cause autism (the most recent just came out). Six have shown that thimerosal doesn’t cause autism; three have shown thimerosal doesn’t cause neurological problems. Studies showing the opposite, like Wakefield’s, use flawed methods, have serious conflicts of interest or have been conducted in animals whose results can’t be extrapolated to humans.
Here’s recent footage of the Israeli navy firing machine guns at unarmed Palestinian fishing boats.
The Sunday Herald reports:
The footage, taken on September 6 by Andrew Muncie, who is from the Highlands, shows an Israeli gunboat engaging fishing boats while international observers hold their arms in the air and scream for them to stop firing.
No-one was injured in the incident, but Palestinian fishermen claim 14 colleagues have been murdered at sea by the Israeli navy since the onset of an economic blockade imposed after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Israel says patrolling these waters is a vital security measure to stop weapons being smuggled into Gaza.
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Apparently there’s a big event on the horizon. A group of aliens calling themselves the Galactic Federation of Light are coming to earth on the 14th of October, in a prelude to saving us from the shit heads who currently run the place.
The message addresses “all people of earth” but then goes on to say “it shall be in the south of your hemisphere and it shall scan over many of your states … We give to you the name of Alabama.” So either it addresses all people of earth but then goes on to ignore them and speak to just the Americans (those in the southern part of the northern hemisphere), or the event is to be in the Southern Hemisphere and someone got their geography screwed up because Alabama ain’t in the Southern Hemisphere.
I’m picking the earlier; that Blossom, our messenger, is American and it’s a simple ethnocentric mistake. This is probably the same reason the alien guy in the background of the video is a blond white dude. Blossom and friends are presumably white Americans.
If these aliens have mastered intergalactic space travel you’d think they would have mastered a little plain English. “We give to you the name of Alabama”? They could have brushed up on their grammar a little too: “Authorities will be intruding into ‘our’ atmospherics that surround our ship.” “We do not come to destruct.”
And where’re the translations? English-only seems a little short-sighted, if not plain unethical coming from such ethical beings.
Then there’s the forewarning and demonisation of those who may be sceptical, a feather out of the cap of religion. And we all know why religions do that. Why would such aliens even feel the need to mention this? Self doubt? It’s no skin off their nose if people are sceptical, as “a craft of great size shall be visible … for all to see.”
Lastly, the message comes from someone called ‘Blossom Goodchild.’
As much as I would dearly love for there to be peaceful aliens who come to save the day, wishing it doesn’t make it so.
I don’t blame people for clutching at this sort of thing. They think, as I think, that humanity has infinitely more potential than it’s currently demonstrating. Essentially they’re searching for outward answers as to why we’ve fucked it up so badly; why we’re steering down the barrel of planetary devastation and World War III. They don’t want to believe that we could be the masters of our own destruction.
It may also have something to do with many of us coming to believe in the dichotomy of good and evil; that there are good people and that there are evil people. People don’t want to believe they’re evil so this inevitably leads one to question how the evil people got here and what we can do about them. Thus enter the alien super hero.
Searching for outward answers is a huge mistake in my opinion. Humans are neither good nor bad but have the capacity for both. Whether we’re destined for brighter things or an evolutionary dead end is unknown but it certainly seems we have the capacity to have a say in the matter. Blaming aliens, or hedging bets on aliens in shining armer, or simply gambling on an afterlife (as religions do) distracts one from doing what we need to do here and now on planet earth.
So, I’ve read this message from Blossom Goodchild and taken a look at the evidence and this is my message to those who want to believe this stuff: if this event doesn’t take place, don’t discount this but remember it as a piece of evidence that strongly contradicts those who profess to know about aliens and their intentions. And in the mean time go read this piece about confirmation bias.
]]>Ben Kuchera, of Ars Technica, writes about the relationship between game software developers and game reviewers, and the mechanisms each have at their disposal to manipulate the other, namely paid advertising and access to information.
It’s a good practical example of some of mechanisms that corrupt a “free press” in a capitalist society and, of course, similar mechanisms are at play with governments and news media.
The writer says there is no easy solution except for reader beware. He’s correct, there is no solution under capitalism, because it’s an inherent problem of capitalism. The only proposed solution I know of is under a different economy.
Update, 7 Sep 2008: Here’s a recent example of a politician doing the same thing. i.e. manipulating news media by withholding access to information, thus ultimately lowering the ability of the targeted new media organisation to make profits.
Davis insisted that “there are no strings attached” to media access to McCain. Yet just this week, McCain abruptly canceled an interview with Larry King as punishment for a tough CNN interview with one of his spokesmen. What’s more, top McCain aide Mark Salter said that “only the good reporters” would get the best seats in the new campaign plane. “You have to earn it,” he said.
Update, 22 Sep 2008: Changed Parecon link from Wikipedia to Znet.
]]>Glenn Greenwald reports on the appalling events in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans have been holding their National Convention over the weekend. It appears the Federal Government has been orchestrating fascist-like police raids across the city on opposition groups in attempt to shut them up.
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.
Massive police raids on suspected protesters in Minneapolis | Sat, 30 Aug 2008
Federal government involved in raids on protesters | Sun, 31 Aug 2008
The Land of the Free, where the Federal Government actively recruits local residents to infiltrate and inform on groups who oppose the government, where the police steal people’s vehicles and leave them stranded on the side of the road to shut them up, where major radio presenters are arrested by thugs in riot gear for having the audacity to ask a policeman a question, and where young women get pepper sprayed in the face for holding a flower up to the police as they walk by her.
Scenes from St. Paul: Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman arrested | Mon, 1 Sep 2008
But, frankly, none of this quasi-fascism compares to apparent lack of outrage from ordinary Americans.
There’s a poem made for these people:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.—Pastor Martin Niemöller.
External links:
Update, 7 Sep 2008: external link to ‘RNC: Media Intimidation Condemned’ added.
]]>No Right Turn on the arbitrary end of all historical Treaty of Waitangi claims.
How can you put an end to seeking redress for breaches of a treaty? It’s an absurd contradiction. Either breaches exist and they need to be investigated and redressed or they don’t exist. Arbitrarily ending the formal process for these investigations to take place is like saying we don’t need courts any more to investigate crimes. In fact it’s like saying you can’t even report crimes any more, let alone have them investigated.
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