News Gloss

Pirates and Emperors

2008-11-18T19:46:00.000-08:00

Certainly any chest-beating speeches about Somali Pirates will bring to mind St. Augustine's story of "Pirates and Emperors". Somalia has been accused of being a "failed state", and having "no government", but every well-organized western democracy, especially the US, has been seizing ships, attacking ships, seizing land, occupying territory, stealing resources, and attacking countries, whenever it's convenient.

Luckily, because of the movies, pirates have such good street credibility, that these Somalis almost look like Robin Hoods. I'm sure they're not, but it's going to be very hard for the general public to get riled about a few ships, while US jets are actively bombing nearly a dozen countries, and have over 1,000 military bases overseas.

Minding the gaps

2008-04-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

Automating the uncovering of propaganda, could simply be a matter of finding the differences between local and global news coverage.

So, for example, the almost non-existent local coverage of the US votes in the UN against nuclear disarmament. This is a regular, big story, outside the US and UK, but it's self-censored within the US national press. Finding the differences should be a snap ... and the gap itself provides significant information.

The percentage of total coverage a story receives is also significant ... something well-understood within most countries. No one thinks that celebrity news or sports news is hard news, and this is regularly decried. But news from the White House also obscures hard news ... this is clearly stated in fictional movies and television shows involving the White House. And yet we have no automated place to go to determine the obscured, real story, in real time. Even though they are often reported loud and clear in the global press. For example, in the Reagan years, when the World Court convicted the US of funding terror attacks against civilian targets in Nicaragua, it really didn't make the news in the US. But the rest of the World Press reported on it, at length.

Ideally, I'd like an option in Google News, to see the top-rated global stories that are not among the top-rated US-UK stories. There's a local analog, where your city newspaper won't report the biggest national scandal about your city ...

People all over the world need to see these differences, to discover which stories their governments and media manage not to tell them.

Citizen rule #1: never trust your government

2007-06-10T11:05:00.000-07:00

I remember when Guantanamo prison was first in the news after 9/11, and I told some friends that secret prisons make no sense, under any circumstances. They said something like "but what if they are really bad people?" My response: "do you trust your government to determine that?" We all want to relax, live our lives and trust that those with power are "doing the right thing". Unfortunately, it's just never true. If you think of it positively, the government always needs help just to know what the right thing is. Because it's too hard to know it, from the abstract heights of power. The system doesn't just need small optimizations -- different levels of government in the US create deadly hardship for people, here and abroad, every minute of the day. Although it's tempting to simply eliminate the insanity of modern government, and start fresh, we will still always need some form of higher-level cooperation -- even the Spanish Anarchists developed syndicalism. So, Citizen Rule #2: always help your government to do the best job it possibly can, and modify its structure as necessary.

Transmission cluster analysis

2007-03-24T01:48:00.000-07:00

On the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour last night, a report from Iraq showed Iraqi families, kicked out of their homes by US soldiers in Bagdhad. This is clearly a violation of their Human Rights, but, in this environment, no one is going to help them. A reporter asked a soldier about this, quite clearly, but the soldier changed the subject, quite unconsciously, and started talking about how brutal was the existence of these families ... the ones he had just brutalized further ... In one sense, he's just doing his job, and wants to think about what he's doing in a positive light. We all do this, when we're being paid to do someone else's bidding. But, in another sense, he had internalized the "talking points" mentality coming out of the executive branch in Washington DC. He'd internalized the company line.

This is why I think some kind of automatic analysis of these "company lines", mined from the data on the web, is possible. Combinations of talking points are like markers of the origin of a line of thinking. The linguistic residue in replicated ideas could allow us to map global thought.

Matching data to slogans

2007-02-26T02:43:00.000-08:00

When I read some politician say "America is the moral leader of the world", I'd like to see a hyperlink to a world-wide poll of opinion on the topic. Given the results of polls like this, it's quite likely that, if international pollsters were to ask the question "rank the US in morality", the US would be considered the most immoral force in the world. A more complex set of questions is appropriate, of course, and simplistic assertions one way or another don't reveal much. That's why it would be very interesting to automate ties between messages and reality. If you could pick out phrases like "american aren't against the war" and generate links to a list of polls about the war, the reader could think about the truthfulness of the speaker. This might have an influence on propaganda, if it could be done in an unbiased manner.

The lost art of evidence fabrication

2007-02-14T08:39:00.000-08:00

On Charlie Rose last night, the Iranian Ambassador said the evidence, presented by the US government to the press, was fabricated. He talked about larger issues, but one thing he said was quite concrete: every weapon manufactured outside the US is marked "day-month-year". But the evidence was very clearly marked in the US fashion: "month-day-year". Talk about your "smoking gun" -- this is a very testable accusation. Either it's accurate, and the press should "press" the administration about it, or it isn't, and the Ambassador shouldn't have brought it up. Unfortunately, as Stephen Colbert points out, truthiness is more important than truth these days. The evidence against Iran was presented with much "military-CIA styling". The actual content is secondary.

The role of the weatherman

2006-11-13T12:05:00.000-08:00

Unlike news based on the words of "opinion-makers", "news-makers", "pundits" and "leaders", weather news (and to some degree sports news) is based on tangible evidence -- reality, which we all review, in person. The weatherman collects more data than we do, but we know the nature of the data, more or less, and he presents his thinking, to a certain degree, and his experience, both of which we judge on its own merits.

His presentation is popular, amateur science. Any of us could do it, if we had the time. In the past, when we were farmers, everyone did it.

Everyone knows the difference between "news" presentations, and evidence presentation.

So let me propose ... that the role of the weatherman needs to expand.

Pollen counts, air pollution, water pollution, tide levels, traffic reports, number of soldiers & civilians killed ... this increasing evidence presentation moves, I believe, in the right direction.

So how about estimates of how many miles were driven today? Or, how many people left town on holiday? Or how many people are in town for conventions? Or how many people rode bicycles today? Or where people go during spring break? Or the effect anything had on local retail sales today? Or on how many people went to a dance or concert? Or, what's the estimate of kids who didn't go to school today? Or today's local homeless count? Or, the number of animals killed locally today, for varying reasons? Or the number of people who died in various ways, or were injured? Or births? Or the local average personal debt, broken down by income? Or, the number of people locally without health insurance? Or the number of people who weren't able to pay bills today? Or, the amount of money made by people of varying income? Or the amount spent by government, for different purposes?

Then, if you have a "weatherman", it would be someone who could begin to tie together some of this data ... and poll data. Like "the number of homeless passed the 1,000 mark in this week's count, and in a poll 30% of the homeless said that paying medical bills prevented them from paying rent. On the same topic, the hospital reports that it treated 500 uninsured patients this week."

We could get a computer to point out some of these possible correlations. But we need timely research, and transparency, to get the data. If there was a public demand, via "weathermen" in the media, such data would be forthcoming.

Note that this role (commentator, weatherman, traffic reporter ...) can be helpful for any specific non-profit project, any city, and any public activity. It can shift consensus and focus public effort upon reality.

The Supposed Popularity of Fast Food

2006-08-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

Back-of-the-envelope calculations can illuminate conventional wisdom.

For example, people get the impression that the majority of the population eats fast food.

But look at McDonald's last world-wide earnings report. $5.572 billion last quarter. Divide by 90 days, and by a $3 average meal price, and you get 20,637,037 meals a day. Well, even if that was all in the US, that's less than %7 of the population eating at McDonald's once each day. Let's say half that is in the US, though. So, if the fast-food industry is ten times the size of McDonald's, only about a third of the US population has a fast food meal every day.

The majority? They eat less branding than one would think.

Oh it's a major operation, I agree

2006-08-11T02:53:00.000-07:00

An allegedly massive and supposedly devastating plot in Britain was "revealed": a well-coordinated trans-continental publicity explosion, a PR stunt and propaganda coup of stunning proportions.

It's quite obvious that the black teens captured in the US a few months back, announced by the Attorney General as "major terrorists", were a kind of "publicity prototype", to be extended and augmented when the next group of wayward teens was discovered. So here it is.

There's possibly some small pretext of reality behind the publicity -- we won't know for years. But the reaction is obviously disproportionate, and intentionally so, because the UK & US governments want to strike fear into the hearts of their citizens. They are kings, terrorizing their subjects, to ensure their re-election.

The talking points are so obviously void and manipulative -- whenever a journalist asked for details, the government officials would say "this is a plot of gigantic proportions -- it would have been worse than 9 / 11". They were well-trained in handling the media, because that's the only reason they bothered making the announcement at all. Not to increase safety, but to manipulate the public.

Automatic recognition and generation

2006-07-17T19:30:00.000-07:00

Just as easily as the US press distributes "establishment wisdom" (or spin) we can recognize it.

Take Google News on the Mexican election. Here are the headlines:

* Calderon Readies New Mexico Government

Washington Post - 50 minutes ago
By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO. MEXICO CITY -- The top vote getter in Mexico's presidential election said Monday he has begun working on his new government, even though the country's electoral court has yet to declare a winner in the disputed race. ...

* Mexico’s leftwing candidate threatens unrest (Financial Times)
* Lopez Obrador fills the streets as marchers demand a recount (Oxford Press)

It's almost a perfect gradient. The US press calls Calderon the top "vote getter" when, in fact, that's in serious dispute. The business press worries about unrest. The non-US press headlines the actual dispute (the stolen election debate).

Here's an academic suggestion:

It seems like we could automate the recognition of the "diminishing influence effect" (probably inversely geometric or inversely exponential) after "talking point" generating events.

The Publick Record

2006-06-28T19:26:00.000-07:00

I found a volume, years 1803 - 1807, entitled "State Papers and Publick Documents of The United States ..."

Imagine my surprise to find the first document's subject: "relative to Morocco" !

"From the president of the United States to Congress. Nov. 4, 1803.

"By the copy now commuicated of a letter from captain Bainbridge of the Philadelphia frigate to our consul at Gilbralter, you will learn that an act of hostility has been committed on a merchant ship of the United States by an armed ship of the emperor of Morocco. This conduct on the part of that power is without cause, and without explanation. It is fortunate that captain Bainbridge fell in with and took the capturing vessel and her prize ; and I have the satisfaction to inform you, that about the date of this transaction such a force would be arriving in the neighborhood of Gilbraltar, both from the east and from the west, as leaves less to be feared for our commerce from the suddenness of the aggression."

This is Thomas Jefferson writing! He sounds like a CEO, making a report to his Board and chief investors.

Obviously the resources of the United States government were regularly used, in fact primarily used, to protect the profits of certain citizens ... merchants, insurance companies, producers etc. This is the reality of the "political process" to this very day.

The masses, the farmers, the natives, etc. had no part in these affairs.

This is just a snapshot, but a useful one. The government & the military grew up together, organically, to protect the interests of the profit-taking class, a small minority of the population. The shape of that state-corporate relationship is the standard history of the US. Nothing has really changed, except that the masses fought for their rights, and gained a measure of the country's resources. Now these are almost completely lost, again.

The Colbert I'd really like to see

2006-05-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

Of course Stephen Colbert's in-your-face satire, standing four feet from Bush, was both brilliant and ballsy. Mark Twain would have given him a standing ovation.

But I think it could have been ... more. If I could perform as well as Colbert, here's some additions to the script I would have made:

Colbert:

I'd like to excoriate, and eviscerate, those treasonous "citizens" who say that Bush is a war criminal. Can you imagine? Those "critics" say that "invasion" is the surpreme international crime, and they make not-so-subtle comparisons between our lovable president [salutes] and Adolf Hitler. Can you imagine? They say: "Germans hanged at Nuremburg for invading other nations" ... which means that these traitors are implicitly threatening our commander-in-chief! Itself a crime! I think we need to stop tolerating this hate speech, and send a special forces squadron after these people, now, before they go too far.

South America & Web 2.0

2006-05-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

Morales, the first indigenous president in modern South America, is taking Bolivia back from the foreign interests that have stolen it.

In Venezuela, nearly 100,000 new, small, local co-operative busisnesses have been created since Chavez took office, in a people-and-nature oriented policy known as endogenous development.

Argentina has just become the first country to free itself from the destructive pro-US policies of the hideous IMF.

There are similar movements in Peru, Uraguay, Ecuador, Brazil ...

Hopefully Columbia, suffering the most from US brutality, will soon free itself.

South America is, for the first time, leading the world in a democratic, populist rebellion against the destructive profit-centric forces of international development.

I don't see any revoluntionary Web 2.0 webapps that are specifically involved in this revolution. Isn't that a little strange? Shouldn't they be, I dunno, a bit more mutually supportive? The goals, after all, are pretty similar: Save the planet.

Noam Chomsky on Intellectual Property

2006-02-02T02:16:00.000-08:00

No one should read the news about the patents, IP, inventors, or "market innovation", without first reading this essay (from worldsocialism.org):

The relation of intellectual property
to personal freedom and its place in
public and academic settings is an
interesting topic with an interesting
history.

The Uruguay Round that set up the
World Trade Organization imposed what is
called a free trade agreement, but which is,
in fact, a highly protectionist agreement
(the US and business leaders being
strongly opposed to free trade and market
economies, except in highly specific ways
beneficial to them). A crucial part of this
agreement was the establishment of very
strong "intellectual property rights". What
this actually means is rights that guarantee
monopoly pricing power to private
tyrannies.

For example, consider a drug
corporation. Most of their serious research
and development - the hard part of it - is
funded by the public. In fact, much of the
dynamism of the world's economy comes
out of public expenditures through the state
system, which is the source of most
innovation and development. There is
some research and development in the
corporate system, but it's mostly at the
marketing end. And this is true of the drug
industry. Once the corporations gain the
benefit of the public paying the costs and
taking the risks, they want to monopolize
the profit and the intellectual property
rights. These rights are not for small
inventors. In fact, the people doing the
work in the corporations don't get much
out of them; at best, they would receive a
small bonus if they invent something. It's
the corporate tyrannies that are making the
profits and they want to guarantee them.

The World Trade Organization
proposed new, enhanced intellectual
property rights - patent rights - far beyond
anything that existed in the past. In fact,
they are not only designed to maximize
monopoly pricing and profit, but also to
prevent development. For instance, the
World Trade Organization rules introduced
the concept of product patents. It used to
be you could patent a process, but not the
product, so if some smart guy could figure
out a better way of producing something,
he could do it. The WTO wants to block
this. It's important to block development
and progress in order to ensure monopoly
rights, so they now have product patents.

Consider US history: suppose the
colonies, after independence, had been
forced to accept this patent regime. What
would we Americans be doing now? First
of all, there would be very few of us at all,
but those of us who would be here would
be pursuing our comparative advantage in
exporting fish and fur. That's what
economists tell you is right - pursue your
comparative advantage. That was our
comparative advantage. We certainly
wouldn't have had a textile industry. The
British textiles were far cheaper and better.
Actually, British textiles were cheaper and
better because Britain had crushed Irish
and Indian superior textile manufacturers
and stolen their techniques. They therefore
became the pre-eminent textile
manufacturer, by force of course. In
actuality, the US does have a textile
industry which grew up around
Massachusetts. But the only way it could
develop was by extremely high tariffs
which protected unviable US industries.
Our textile industry developed and later
had spin-offs into other industries. And so
it continues.

We would never have had a steel
industry either, for the same reason: British
steel was far superior. One of the reasons is
because they were stealing Indian
techniques. British engineers were going to
India to learn about steel-making well into
the 19th century. They ran the country by
force so they could take what the Indians
knew and develop a steel industry. In order
to develop its own steel industry, the US
used massive government involvement
through extremely high tariffs and the
military system, as usual.

This system continues right up to the
present, and furthermore it's true of every
single developed society. It's one of the
best-known truths of economic history that
the only countries that developed are the
ones that pursued these techniques. There
were countries that were forced to adopt
free trade and "liberalization" - the
colonies - and they got destroyed. The
sharp divide between the first and the third
worlds has really taken shape since the
18th century. And maintaining this divide
is what intellectual property rights are for.
In fact, there's a name for it in economic
history: Friedrich List, the famous German
political economist in the 19th century,
who borrowed his major protectionist
doctrines from Andrew Hamilton, called it
"kicking away the ladder". First you use
state power and violence to develop, then
you kick away those procedures so that
other people can't do it.

Intellectual property rights have very
little to do with individual initiative.
Einstein didn't have any intellectual
property rights on relativity theory. Science
and innovation is carried out by people
who are interested in it; that's the way
science works. However, there's been an
effort in very recent years to
commercialize it, much the same way
everything else has been commercialized.

So you don't do science because it's
exciting and challenging, because you want
to find out something new, and because
you want the world to benefit from it; you
do it because maybe you can make some
money out of it. You can make your own
judgment about the moral value.
Personally, I think it's extremely
cheapening, but also destructive of
initiative and development.

It's important to note that the profits
from patents commonly don't go back to
the individual inventors. This is a very
well-studied topic. Take, for example, the
well-studied case of computer-controlled
machine tools, which are now a
fundamental component of the economy.

There's a very good study of this by David
Noble, a leading political economist. What
he discovered is that these techniques were
invented by some small guy working in his
garage somewhere in, I think, Michigan.
After the MIT mechanical engineering
department learned about it, they picked up
these techniques and developed them and
extended them and so on, and the
corporations came and picked them up
from MIT, and finally it became a core part
of US industry. Well, what happened to the
guy who invented it? He's still probably
working in his garage in Michigan or
wherever it is. And that's very typical.
I just don't think intellectual property
has much to do with innovation or
independence. It has to do with protecting
major concentrations of power which
mostly got their power as a public gift, and
making sure that they can maintain and
expand their power. And these highly
protectionist devices really have to be
rammed down the public's throat. They
don't make any economic sense or any
other sense.

Neither do I think that intellectual
property should play any role in academic
and public institutions. In 1980 the Bayh-
Dole Act gave universities the right to
patent inventions that came out of their
own research. But nothing comes strictly
out of a university's own research; it comes
out of public funding. That's how the
university can function; that's how their
research projects work. The whole system
is set up to socialize cost and risk to the
general public, and then within that
context, things can be invented. But I don't
think universities should patent them. They
should be working for the public good, and
that means the fruits of their research
should be available to the public.

- Noam Chomsky

Obscuring power: or why Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs make me see red

2006-01-31T22:56:00.000-08:00

In the final episode of "Guns, Germs and Steel", I had some hope. Diamond pointed out that Africa, difficult for the west to settle, became a colonial source of slaves, mineral & agricultural wealth. "And I realized" Diamond said on the train "that the very train I was on, today still served the same purpose." My hopes rose: would he say it? These are still western colonies! Say it! "But these aren't colonies anymore. They are free democratic societies." Arrrrgh!!!!! He then blames malaria for poverty. It's unbelievable. This is what passes for anaylsis in the 21st century: a man who can't connect the dots, because it would accuse people he knows -- of continuing the tradition of Projecting Power.

It could be that Diamond is just a poor reader. He needs to study Rousseau, Marx, and lots of Chomsky. But, it's more likely that he just suffers from not wanting to accuse those in his class ... fellow professors, writers etc.

Take the other two in my title: Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs. Professors, writers, movers & shakers ... they've also positioned themselves. Diamond is a biogeographical apologist for power. Friedman is a geopolitical apologist for power. Sachs is a macroeconomic apologist for power. And they all use the world's massive inequalities to further their punditry and obscure the truth: that poverty exists to continuously concentrate wealth & power, and does so now, at this very moment. It didn't stop in 1865, 1914, 1945, 1961 or 1990. It is still going on today, as fast as ever, killing millions. And the wealthy classes in all countries are hiding this fact from their intellectual & managerial classes ("civil society"), ensuring the masses continue to be enslaved, their resources stolen, their environments polluted, nature destroyed, etc.

The only difference, perhaps: Sachs & Friedman certainly know their crimes, because they purposely hide their own roles (Sachs in the destruction of every country he's ever advised, Friedman as propagandist for the Council on Foreign Relations). But Diamond is just an author, being polite, working within the framework. Maybe he'll open his eyes someday.

Blaming geography for 'progress'

2006-01-20T13:55:00.000-08:00

On PBS, Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs & Steel" suffers from standard academic blinkering. Asked by a New Guinean why "white men have so much cargo, but we have none", he doesn't look at the power projection he represents in this aboriginal culture. He doesn't say: "because some people in my world make a lot of money from that disparity".

No. He starts to insult their food supply: not enough protein. In a strange oversight, somehow he doesn't mention that river & coastal-dwelling New Guineans eat fish. He says their food supply (he mentions mostly roots) "is viable, just not abundant". And he contrives a correlation between powerful civilizations and large domesticated animals. Somehow, Incan civilization was due to the Llama. I suppose Mayan civilization was fueled by magical-realist dreams about future cows? He's a biologist, but somehow hasn't noticed that 'progress' often happens because of scarcity, not abundance. And there's no questioning, in this show, of whether "cargo" is progress. Although, from the name of the series, we'll be seeing that western 'progress' is violent. I'd give him points for that, if it was a new idea.

Of course luck plays some role in the development of extreme power inequality. Or else there would be none. But power inequality develops to some degree in all human communities ... it exists on Papua New Guinea too. He just doesn't show it. With larger populations, the inequalities grow, as does the accumulation of habits & technology for conquest. He hints at this, but the overwrought presentation of his weak geographic evidence clouds over it. This is really a missed opportunity.

We live in a material world built on inequality. The system thrives upon it, and fools its intellectual class, who don't want to think of themselves as vampires, into instead thinking that inequality was an accident, and that it is lessening. In fact it is increasing dramatically, everywhere, continually. The only cases where this reverses, historically, are when mass opinion and action push back, against the inequality imposed upon it by the wealthy, powerful & violent minority.

Disappearing differences & assertive enclosures

2005-11-07T09:55:00.000-08:00

Thoughtful religious people, with great subtlety, resolve for themselves the idea of a god, or gods, with what they learn about life through experiment & analysis, scientific and historical. Many thoughtful people who do not believe in a god, or gods, have nonetheless explored ideas about the force of life, and have an unquelchable fascination with the depth of human experience and insight possible under spiritual influence. These two views, or gradients, overlap in so many ways ... with a glass of wine, goodwill, time, and mutual respect, people can agree on almost everything about the nature of the universe.

Then propaganda and power politics enter the picture. The expensive 'Intelligent Design' publicity campaign builds walls between people, so supporters can be identified, money collected, votes counted. It's the death of subtlety, in yet another realm of potential connection between people.

It's fixable, however. We'll just need to spend more time together.

The Guardian is long gone

2005-11-07T00:23:00.000-08:00

Peaceworkers are angry about the recent, hip-defamatory fake-interview with Noam Chomsky in The Guardian. They react as though the Guardian is a socially-responsible newspaper. On the contrary, it has been fascistic for several years, and has backed Blair's backing of Bush's invasions and occupations. It also universally praises western-style export development in the third-world, and elsewhere, as a good thing, and bashes social spending in Europe. In two years, The Guardian went from being rather pleasant to becoming transparently aggressive towards enlightenment values. So the Chomsky smear is unsurprising.

What does surprise me, kind of, is how the metamorphosis happened so quickly, and in the Internet Age, when there's supposedly better access to information. Apparently the major media are increasingly protecting their buttered sides in the face of the new opinions. Global Voices are really getting drowned out.

Journalism is NOT the first draft of history

2005-11-06T02:12:00.000-08:00

Which shallow hack wrote "journalism is the first draft of history"?

One might as well say that "journalism is the first draft of Physics and Chemistry". Or that a historian's other resources -- interviews, government records, photos, films, buildings, the arts -- are also "first drafts of history".

The worst part, of course, is that journalism is usually very far from the truth, because journalists rarely investigate. This is because they are required to base their stories upon the quotes, reports, press releases of "significant" players -- giving their stories a striking elite bias. Also, journalists are heavily indoctrinated by their peers, who serve commercial interests, rather than popular interests such as justice, or scientific ones such as truth.

"Lingering" nuclear weapons?

2005-10-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

"The Hunt for Nazi Scientists", a show tonight on PBS's "Secrets of the Dead", does a pretty nice job of presenting the post-war competition for important Nazi military technology: jet fighters, ballistic missiles and nuclear fission. The Nazis define militarism to this day.

One of the nicest moments was a slave laborer, near-starved in Werner von Braun's V2 factory, commenting on his disgust when von Braun was celebrated after his success with Apollo 11. Von Braun is the classic "tech visionary for hire". He worked hard to kill civilians for the Nazis, and then he worked hard to build the US missile program, which backed the killing of millions of civilians by the US after WWII, and constantly pushed forward the arms race.

The program talks about these missiles in their nuclear silos, a von Braun legacy "that still lingers today".

The US is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons, against civilians. It has more than anyone, and refuses to reduce its stockpile. It is planning on building more. US nuclear weaponry is the bulwark of small-country bullying by hawks like Bush, and is the most likely future cause of a human holocaust. That's quite a heavy bit of "lingering".

Courtiers

2005-10-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

There are many courtiers serving powerful state & corporate interests, in the US, and in most countries. Some of them are disguised as economists, just as they were in Stalin's USSR, Hitler's Germany, in the British Empire, etc.

In the current global destruction, led by the US, Jeffery Sachs is a typical example of the economist-courtier. His crimes against humanity are well-documented, and obvious. But he works hard to polish his public image. He serves power so effectively, yet works so hard against the interests of people, that well-meaning journalists cannot understand him, and it's easy to find articles about him, which jump back and forth, confusing the frames of reference of the rich and the poor.

Sach's current obsession with debt relief, along with that of Bono, should immediately raise one's suspicions. On a recent PBS documentary, Bono answered some of his critics by pointing to their successful debt cancellation, saying something like "you can't argue with our success".

Well, yes you can. The debt was just a weapon: the banks didn't need the money. Debt was a 'means', not an 'end'. So far, this debt relief either 1) is used to further restructure a country in line with IMF rules or 2) make room for more destructive development money.

The assumption is that development/aid money is a good thing. It isn't. Because the purpose of these loans and aid are not to help people: they are intended to provide resources for a country's wealthy minority, and extract the maximum benefit for their powerful first-world allies.

The other assumption is that development itself is a good thing. It isn't. This assumption invalidates the lives & cultures of indigenous peoples all over the world, whose land and resources have been taken, and who are forced to migrate to the edge of cities & industrial centers in order to survive. Or worse.

Let's take the example of Bolivia. You can find essays everywhere, including in Sach's new book, about the miracles he performed there, as a young man. I think I'll just quote Noam Chomsky on the subject:

Take Bolivia. It was in trouble. It had brutal dictators, highly repressive, huge debt, the whole business. The West went in. Sachs was the advisor, with the IMF rules: stabilize the currency, increase agro-export, cut down production for domestic needs, subsistence agriculture, etc. It worked. The figures, the macroeconomic statistics, looked quite good. The currency has been stabilized. The debt has been reduced. The GNP is increasing.

There are a few little flaws in the ointment: poverty has rapidly increased. Malnutrition has increased. the educational system has collapsed. But most interesting is what has in fact stabilized the economy: agricultural exports. But not coffee. Coca.

It's interesting to me that, in principle, anyone listens to servants of power. They are bad sources.

Certainly people like Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, or Jeffrey Sachs would be in the same position no matter which kind of state system they were serving. That's clear from the fact that they will distance themselves from polticians they believe are declining in power (Bush, for example, in Friedman's recent conversion).

To reposition themselves, they simply change their double-speak as needed.

Disinfotainment

2005-09-16T13:04:00.000-07:00

Last night, ABC had a reasonably well-researched show called "System failure" hosted by Ted Koppel. Many of the issues that arise from Hurricane Katrina were covered, in a nice general overview.

As always, good journalism has to be followed by bad.

The next show was called something like "Ready or not", an hour of poorly researched disinfotainment.

Just as a start, it probably caused some future deaths, because it repeated the long discredited notion that you should jump under a desk during an earthquake! That's a sure way to get crushed by a desk. Current field experts now recommend that you lie down next to a desk, so it can protect you from falling heavy structure.

But any show that begins with a panic propagated by the Council on Foreign Relations is already in the looney bin. The CFR does nothing without a purpose, and this purpose was clearly to distract from the ongoing problems in the medical industry, and divert funds to expensive 'emergency preparedness' plans. If we had a truly accessible, responsible and robust medical system, we'd be much better prepared for a disaster. Instead, the CFR-led story concentrated on the lack of a single drug, for a disease that has not yet evolved!

Someone, with money, should initiate a class action suit against the CFR, for causing death by distraction.

Not now? You're kidding ...

2005-09-06T01:29:00.000-07:00

Powerful politicians plead "hey, no politics now. No investigations or accusations or blame, now. We're all in this together. Let's get to work. We'll investigate problems later."

Sheesh. The problems are happening now. They've been happening.They will continue to happen without immediate, hurricane-strength investigation. FEMA as a control organization is not concerned with helping people, and this is a political issue of tremendous magnitude.

I don't mean the emergency workers themselves: I mean the mission of FEMA the organization. It's supposed to maintain control. It didn't let the Red Cross in the city. It didn't let the Cuban doctors into the city. It didn't let Wal-Mart into the city with bottled water. FEMA even threatened to kill rescuers risking their lives in boats trying to help people.

The empire doesn't care about people. Th emperors are very good at 'acting' like humanitarians. Don't let power re-write your thinking about "what is reasonable". Question authority. Now.

Stylish Romans

2005-08-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

According to Michael Babcock of Newsday, the US is an Empire, and should be proud of it. It's funny to see it said so openly. He means it as a compliment: the US is a 'good' empire. He says the US is the Roman Empire. Lovely.

Despite my love of the Monty Python movie "Life of Brian" (easily the funniest movie of all time), I don't think one can seriously think that the Roman Empire was good for the majority.

The subsistence economies Rome destroyed, the aboriginals they slaughtered, the deadly & capricious changes in the legal system, the extreme tyranny & terror ... and for what 'progress', exactly?

There's no such thing as a good empire.

The US is, however, the most destructive Empire in history. It beats them all. And has the best publicity money can buy.

Imperial cliché

2005-08-28T16:04:00.000-07:00

It's really sad when a reasonable phrase is turned into a "talking point" for state terror.

Take "challenges facing US foreign policy". This means "how does the US keep its boot firmly on the necks of people who don't like it?" If you do a google search on this phrase, you'll get dozens of foreign poicy apologists, organized as 'think-tanks' like the "Council on Foreign Relations" and "Inter-American Dialogue".

Pat Robertson recently offered a glimpse of US foreign policy: kill, invade and keep the oil flowing. Oh, I'm paraphrasing. The real quote is much better:

We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.

To distract from this peek behind the curtain, the Foreign Policy spin-doctors immediately started operating on Chavez. Michael Shifter of Inter-American Dialogue:

The challenge for U.S. policy is to contest the validity of Chavez's claims and his grandiose but wrongheaded designs. Policy alternatives need to be devised that come to grips with harsh realities but do not jettison modern Western values.

Western values such as the killing of half a million people in Central America in the 1980's? Or the western values of selling Bolivia's water to private Western interests for profit? Or the Western Values of attacking any country that embarks on social spending?