Give Americans some credit-we’re not still going to fall for the old THINK-TANKS story again

from FOX NEWS “Think Tanks Say Obama Should Shift Focus From Iraq to Iran”

A report from analysts at two major think tanks says Barack Obama should focus on curtailing Iran’s nuclear program and promoting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.  What a piece. No names of who at these supposed “think-tanks”. Well, I did a little thinking myself, and I analyzed that Obama should talk with Iran itself, instead of relying on Bush’s old think-tanks, and let’s talk instead about Israel’s nuclear program, and then we will let them promote peace among themselves. What old and worn out is this term of the Bush mouthpieces: Don’t these “THINK-TANKS have names, reminds me of BOMB-SHELTERS. Come on, we voted for CHANGE, not the same old repetoire.

Dennis Kucinich – most courageous Congressman

The Fight Americans Can’t Afford to Lose Everyday Americans are in the fight of their lives. Their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their savings, a modest standard of living – all under assault by rising prices, tightened credit, corporate greed, and a Congress that has bailed out Wall Street financial interests at the expense of taxpayers and to the detriment of struggling homeowners. The fight is far from over, and the ONE Congressman who has been the leader in defending your interests needs your help to continue being your voice in Washington. Dennis Kucinich has been sounding the alarm for years. He has led the opposition to these obscene giveaways to corrupt interests that have been gambling with your hard-earned dollars. He’s been demanding direct assistance to Americans whose lives and futures are at risk – proposing real economic recovery programs that will create millions of jobs and put money in the pockets of working men and women all across the country. But, as Dennis continues fighting for the interests of everyday Americans, he’s also fighting to hold on to his seat in the House of Representatives against a Republican who’s raising money, spending money, and aggressively seeking to put Ohio’s 10th Congressional District into GOP hands. The honest, decent, hard-working families of this country can’t afford to lose the fight of their lives. And they can’t afford to lose Congressman Dennis Kucinich. His voice is crucial to our future. And your support has never been more important.

Photographer’s View of Chad’s Refugee Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/world/20080215_CHAD_FEATURE/index.html

Another threat to our Public Sphere

According to Jurgen Habermas (1962), it is crucial for society to enshrine free communications, a prerequisite to social justice. Mass media is the chief institution of publications. Media institutions are concerned with organization, financing, legal frameworks of media ownership, control, licensing, access, communication discourse such as the BBC, CBC, and PBS. Right now there is a threat to some of them:

Reject Bush’s Cuts to Public Broadcasting

“This past week, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration has once again proposed deep cuts in federal funding for public broadcasting. Unfortunately the cuts proposed this year are even more severe than in past …

For 8 straight years, the President’s budget requests have attempted to cut or entirely eliminate funding for public broadcasting. For seven of those years, Congress has responded to massive public pressure and restored the funding. This year’s proposed cuts are the deepest ever proposed by the administration. Even Patricia Harrison, a former co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee who currently serves as the President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), has called these cuts “draconian.” In addition to slashing current and future funding, this year’s proposal even tries to go back and withdraw funding already approved in previous years.

Practically every day we hear a new story about media consolidation. More and more, the free press that is so essential to our democracy is owned and controlled by a smaller and smaller number of mega-corporations. Never has it been more essential to have a publicly funded, noncommercial media outlet that provides thoughtful rather than partisan news and doesn’t waste our time covering Britney Spears and the baseball steroids scandal.

In his last year in office, don’t let Bush pull the plug on Bill Moyers, the News Hour, Big Bird, and the Cookie Monster.”

Petition: “We ask that all members of Congress join us in supporting full funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in fiscal year 2009, as well as rejecting the President’s proposed rescissions of funding already approved in prior fiscal years.

This administration’s proposed cuts to the CPB budget are short-sighted and unnecessary. Overwhelmingly, polls show that the American people — of all political persuasions — enjoy the publicly-funded, noncommercial programming offered by CPB and PBS.

Many families do not have access to cable and depend upon PBS for kid-friendly programming that is not offered by the major networks, especially in the prime time hours. Cuts to public broadcasting would threaten such programming. To end this debate once and for all, Congress should guarantee permanent funding for CPB and full independence from any partisan meddling.”

Sign the petition here: http://act.credomobile.com/campaign/save_pbs/8wekssn918dexim?

 

A threat to our public sphere? Sabotage in Middle East? Government refuses comment.

Cut Gulf Internet cable

By KATARINA KRATOVAC, Associated Press Writer Fri Feb 8, 2:24 PM ET

CAIRO, Egypt – An abandoned anchor was responsible for cutting one of the undersea Internet cables severed last week, causing disruptions across the Middle East and parts of Asia, the cable’s owner said Friday. A FLAG Telecom repair crew discovered the anchor near where the fiber-optic cable was severed Feb. 1 in the Persian Gulf, 35 miles north of Dubai, between the Emirates and Oman.

Weighing more than 5.5 tons, the anchor has been pulled to the surface. The company did not immediately explain whether the anchor moved and snapped the cable or whether the cable itself was drifting when it was sliced.

 

It remains unclear exactly how any of the cuts occurred.

… A second FLAG repair ship continued work on two undersea cables that were cut Jan. 30. They are about 5 miles off the north coast of Egypt, near the port city of Alexandria, and run between Egypt and Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily. One of the two Mediterranean cables was owned by FLAG. The other, identified as SEA-ME-WE 4, or South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable, was owned by a consortium of 16 international telecommunication companies.

 

Egypt’s telecommunication ministry said no ships were registered near the location at the time. The cuts slowed businesses, hampered personal Internet usage and caused a flurry of Internet blogger speculation, including mentions of sabotage. Government authorities and FLAG, which stands for Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, have refused to comment on the speculation.

 

Reports of additional cuts in Middle East Internet cables could not be confirmed. FLAG, in a statement posted on the company Web site, said it has surveyed the cable cut off Egypt with remotely operated robots.

 

The FLAG spokesman said this week that it was laying a new cable underwater between Egypt and France that would be “fully resilient” against cuts such as last week’s and “provide a diversity in routes.” He did not say what that resilience entailed, but said it would take months to set up the new cable.

 

“It is difficult to comment right now on this,” said a FLAG spokesman, reached over the telephone. “We are doing our own investigation.” He spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy. Ovum analyst Matt Walker said undersea cable networks are highly vulnerable to deliberate attack and need enhanced security.

 

… “The economic cost of losing, or even just slowing down, international communications is extremely high,” said Walker. “This risk has to be factored into the calculations behind the investment level and design of undersea optical networks.” …

 

AP Business Writer Matt Moore contributed to this report from Frankfurt, Germany.

 

U.S. heading to war in Iran, says former inspector

BY: MARILYN H. KARFELD Senior Staff Reporter

08/02/08 “Cleveland Jewish News“ — – The former chief United Nations weapons inspector and a retired Middle East diplomat recently warned that America was heading straight toward imminent war with Iran.

John McCain April 20, 2007: Bomb, Bomb Iran

 

Artifacts with Politics

 

 

 

http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/glossary/newglosshome3.html

Hegemony, Subculture, Advertising and the Spectacle

Edward Ames, Julia Reid, and Tim O’Connor.

March 19, 1993
SOAN 370 – American Advertising and the Science of Signs.

RAMBLE ON EDWARD

Advertising is one of the major institutions of the intellectuals (see Antonio Gramsci) supporting the structural and ideological interests of the ruling class, the dominant cultures of our late capitalist society. Modern society, organized along the lines of capitalist production and expansion, requires advertising to engineer the ’spontaneous’ consent to, and participation in, the ideology of mainstream capitalist culture among the masses of people. This essential component serves to create the optimum conditions for capitalist expansion and furthers the elitist businessmen’s control of economic production. Stuart Ewen described this nicely in his book on the evolution of modern advertising (as did Lears in his article, though he meant not to). Due to overproduction and underconsumption created by the industrial revolution Ewen states, “It became imperative [for the businessman] to invest the laborer with a financial power and a psychic desire to consume,” or in other words to a transform the American Dream from success as an entrepreneur to success as an acquire of goods (Ewen 1976: 25). Laborers learned, with the help of advertisements, to exchange their labor for a wage which was in turn exchangeable for goods that supposedly offered them freedom and signified success and social worth, while in fact it stripped them of true empowerment, a unified identity and “evoked their participation in their own oppression” (Herskovitz, 1979: 182).

 

 

 

 

The Internet and Politics by Dr. Merlyna Lim

1 a      http://youtube.com/watch?v=beWGVUVHsAM
1 b      http://youtube.com/watch?v=RhmUvMmooJA
2         http://youtube.com/watch?v=BbUOUtNjp9o
3         http://youtube.com/watch?v=IqE-MB5-aaY

Politics of the Internet

Will American society continue to exclude ordinary citizens from important choices about the design and development of new technologies and information systems? Most likely there will continue to be unequal power over decisions about what is built and why, intensive efforts to hem in and control people’s lives in both work and consumerism, and present our future as something nonnegotiable.

Businesses will demonstrate accomplishment in what could and should be choices only to be decided by public investigation and debate – a disguised form of economic plunder. They conceal their strategy by designs that appeal to individual gratification which complicate social issues. Those with the understanding of what is happening must choose to protest or at least inform groups willing to take action on behalf of the community.

The technological vulnerability of the Internet offers the opportunity for expression of protest against agencies or corporations targeted as oppressive or exploitive. “Hacker-Activists” have previously broken into restricted websites of military agencies and financial companies in order to call attention to their insecurity and to protest against their goals.

We don’t want social outcomes “determined by market forces.” Every day, someone makes deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology. Should it be someone with commercial intent, concealed or otherwise? Have we traded away much of our humanity and gracious way of living for a lifestyle which leaves others hungry, plundered or dead?

Computer professionals with insight into important matters with social outcomes must express their knowledge and judgments to a broad public or be complicit in the capitalist conspiracy. Information technology and social justice are now interconnected. We need social policies that defend democratic social choice against corporate manipulation and the false labeling of dynamic changes in social or living conditions as “progress” or as “unstoppable.” Where there are obvious and increasing signs of social disorder, look for propaganda and hidden agendas. Computer professionals are not “value-neutral” any longer. They are the best positioned to help democracy and society on a global level or assist in creating victims.

Before access to information technology, our existing information systems attempted to control the flow of information through taboos, costs, and restrictions. Governments do not believe that information should be free. Corporations feel they should not only control it, but charge for it as well.

But the digital world celebrates the right of the individual to speak and be heard, the foundation of American media and democracy. The world’s information is being liberated, and so are we. The hackers and geeks who founded and shaped it believed that there should be no obstacles between people and information. They are the ones that can thwart the obstructions to freedom and democracy that are constantly being devised by government and business. The dominant ethic of this community is that information wants to be free. That idea is antithetical to the history and nature of politics and capitalism. Instead of the government watching people, people should watch their government. Power increasingly functions in global networks, bypassing the institutions of the nation-state. Social movements must be able to compete with corporations and governments in their global impact on the media. The Internet is an ideal facilitator of social movements because it cannot be disorganized or captured.

Can the Digital Revolution will show us solutions for eradicating poverty, ignorance, and war in radical and hopeful ways? Technology is power. Education is power. Communication is power. The citizens of the Digital Nation could form a political movement based on common global values, a moral ideology, and a humane agenda which could construct a more civil society, new politics based on rationalism, shared information, the pursuit of truth, and new kinds of community.

Learning the Politics of Technology

I am unsure whether the thought that architectural design was a reflection of politics has ever occurred to me, though I have always been suspicious of veiled racial and social prejudice. Still, it was shocking to find out how bold and elaborate was the discrimination that was sketched into the public works design for Long Island. In the 1920s, Robert Moses, public works planner abused his position to add exclusive amenities to his large-scale engineering projects. Those amenities, though funded with public money, were exclusive to whites and middle to upper-class society. Who would have suspected the designer behind approximately 200 bridges out to Long Island was really designing politics? But he did not work alone.  

The overpasses, their design seemingly inoffensive were so low that some had only 9' clearance from curb. The buses, 12 feet tall, were unable to maneuver the low overpasses. The intended result was that racial minorities and low-income people were kept from Jones Beach. This restriction was made even more effective when Moses vetoed extending the Long Island Railroad there. Blacks and poor people were effectively kept out of Long Island without any battle being waged. Only private cars, which they did not own, could travel those parkways. These giant structures of steel and concrete transformed the New York social-political landscape for many years. How much time and money would it take to replace such basic infrastructure?  

It would seem, at least, that New York planner Lee Koppleman and Robert Caro, biographer of Moses, showed some kind of integrity in bringing these facts to light for us. Hopefully, hearts and minds change quicker than steel and concrete. Eventually the bridges will be replaced. Maybe the new artists can create structures which will symbolize mutual respect and demonstrate the strength diversity can bring us.  There will always be technological bias where there is any bias at all. Any method capable of usurping power will always be seized upon, whether it is in the building or burning of bridges. Power can be stolen in the name of religion, whether crusaders or terrorists, by the declaration of war, by the subtleties in laws and covenants, and in technological design. Corruption of power and schemes to exclude are the result of human greed or insecurity of one's personal value, but is it an innate human trait?  

Where will this leave the Internet? This powerful technological tool was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. Obviously, there was political motive. But ironically it has been the most effective tool for sharing with the rest of the world the horrors of war. It allows instant communication on political atrocities by foreign governments (which might distract us from what our own government is doing.) Have you heard from any of Burma's monks lately? The Internet can provide us with access to information not found our own media. It is a way to make money also. How long will it be before there are laws to widen the gap between those who can and cannot afford the Internet?

Kyoto Protocol

Do you find it globally undemocratic that the U.S. refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and submit itself as a real world leader by example? Look at the number of U.S. cities and states demonstrating themselves as leaders, along with all of the countries that have already committed and signed the Protocol. I find this position taken by the U.S. wrong, lacking in nobility and courage because the Protocol is fair. What’s really going on here?