Radical media, politics and culture.

Onto writes:

"Towards a Critical Analysis of Media EmergenC"
Media EmergenC Assembly

Introduction

From October 6th–9th, as the National Association of Broadcasters was holding their annual Radio Road Show in San Diego, a group of media activists converged to try to illuminate what is wrong with the corporate media and to strengthen independent, community autonomous media. This convergence was called the Media emergenC, highlighting the two themes of emergency and emergence. With 4 days of talks, film screenings, marches, panels, forums and independent media making, the media activists, mostly composed of members of San Diego Indymedia and radioActive sanDiego, but including media makers from as far away as New York and Philadelphia, tried to confront the NAB as had been done in many other cities, but also to challenge the independent media movement and push it forward. For an overview of the events, see here.

Mara Kaufman writes

"A Hacker's Perspective on the Social Forums"
Mara Kaufman



Of the 155,000 people at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre this January, some were chosen by their communities to represent them. Some were sent by their organizations. Some were delegated by their constituencies. But many of us were there because we could be — paid activists, paid students, and people who can afford to take a week off of work in the middle of January. This is a key issue for the forum phenomenon: anybody can go, but going so far rests largely on a kind of privileged volunteerism.

s0metim3s writes:

"Lessons from the Pietariat"

Mute Magazine

Sometimes it's hard to tell self-congratulation from self-abasement. Not a Proper Job, a tempting directory for artists, was launched in London in October at a party advertised as follows: 'If you live a creative lifestyle, you are by definition a member of the 'Not a Proper Job' club. So come join us and celebrate not having a Proper Job. Birds of a feather should flock together!'

The Nuclear Club Expands
By Immanuel Wallerstein

North Korea has now said officially that it already has nuclear weapons, and is not at all interested
in discussing giving them up. Iran still claims it
doesn't intend to make nuclear weapons. However it also says it will not
discuss abandoning the progress it has made in developing nuclear enrichment
facilities (which means of course that it could easily produce nuclear
weapons when it wished to do so). And what does the United States say? The
United States doesn't know what to say and is floundering. Henry Kissinger
is sputtering, in print and on television. Condoleeza Rice is calling Iran a
totalitarian state and telling the Europeans that they have to tell Iran
clearly and loudly that, if Iran persists in its nuclear enrichment program,
there will be U.N. sanctions (and the Europeans are telling her that such
statements by her, made publicly or even privately, are distinctly
counterproductive).

nolympics writes:

"Mara Salvatrucha, Social War and the Decline of the Revolutionary Movements in Central America"

Ramor Ryan


Once this was a place of great hope. During the late 1980’s, the Sandinistas were consolidating the revolution in Nicaragua, the FMLN were on the brink of overthrowing the government in El Salvador and the radical movements in Guatemala and Honduras were gaining ground. Today it is a region convulsed by massive delinquency and chronic state corruption whose economies are surviving tenuously on remittance money sent by migrants. The defeat of the revolutionary movements has ushered in an era of social disintegration resulting in a veritable neo-liberal dystopia.

Chicken Bus Diaries

People in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have always had travel like this. 100 people crush into generic American school buses. The old school buses earn the chicken moniker because of the propensity of people to bring their livestock onboard. Sometimes the animals are tied up in boxes on the roof. In other Latin American countries the passengers cram on the roof too, but not here in Central America. The way the drivers swing the buses around the mountain curves would pitch anything off the roof that was not tied down. But the bus service is cheap and abundant, catering for the poorest passenger, and it must be said they are painted in the most exquisite manner — each bus a blaze of color and a work of art.

"Hiroshima, Mon Amour"
John Chuckman

A few columnists and commentators who questioned or opposed the invasion of Iraq, now say, having been touched by pictures of Iraqis bravely casting ballots, that George Bush was right.


Such is the persuasive power of positive propaganda, which works by focusing on true details, ignoring their ugly context, and such is the wisdom imparted by need-to-get-a-column-out thinkers.


First, much as I admire the Iraqis who voted, any human being's sense of fear or horror is relative to his or her circumstances. People do become inured to horrible conditions. That is how they survive wars, plagues, slavery, and even death camps.


And George Bush's Iraq is a pretty horrible place. Not just a bloody invasion but civil chaos have worked to make it so, and Iraqis were already hardened to horrors by the decade-long American embargo and the devastation of the first Gulf War.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Paul McCartney, Super Bowl Anarchist?

Anonymous Comrade


Fox and the Super Bowl thought they had it all figured out. They figured they'd avoid controversy all together by featuring unarguably one of, if not the most respected pop musicians of all time. Simple and sweet, one act, a maturing white man playing four of what most would agree are some of the greatest pop songs ever recorded. Classics, (as in Coca Cola Classic) sung by a classic, who laid the groundwork for popular music period. No dancers, no big current names, no young blood, instead a seasoned professional reciting what amounts at this point to elevator music.

Despite this idiot proof plan, despite the projections of patriotic images, Fox/NFL would not get there way so easily. Despite the giant card display that taunted "Na Na Na" in red white and blue at the colonized world, watching from their couches, a statement as controversial if not more than last years was made. The broadcast delay and the censors could do nothing.

E. Heroux writes:

"The Fascist Church"

E. Heroux

"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter." — Adolf Hitler, in a speech on April 12th, 1922.

It goes without saying that only some Christians are fascists; that not all Christians are fascists; that a few Christians went so far as to oppose fascism, for example under the Nazis in Germany. A few openly opposed Hitler's plans even when threatened with punishment of death, as in the tragic case of the Christian intellectual, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But it doesn't go without saying that most Christians in Germany willingly followed Hitler and supported the rise of the Nazis. And it doesn't go without saying that a substantial number of American Christians are now crypto-fascists as I began to suggest in a previous blog.


It bears repeating this history lesson here as nobody was taught it, (and I do apologize for the seeming cliche of having to drag in tired old Hitler yet again!). Be we live in ahistorical times where the entire past is like some dark basement we've never wondered about, but rather papered over with childish myths and Hollywood fantasies; where "reality-based" is somehow wrongheaded; where people shake their heads in denial when confronted with facts; where ahistoric anachronism rules in vapid ignorance not only of the past but equally of our own present, about which few know anything at all worth knowing. So, off my pulpit and onto just the facts:

Marx and Makhno Meet McDonalds's:

Casualized Workers in Paris Win Several Strikes,
Honorably Lose Another with Combined
Union and Non-Union, Legal and Illegal Tactics

Loren Goldner (1), Break Their Haughty Power

Over the last several years, a revolving network of militants in Paris, France, have developed a strategy and tactics for winning strikes by marginal, low-paid, outsourced and immigrant workers against international chains, in situations where the strikers are often ignored by unions to which they nominally belong, or are actually obstructed by them.


While some of these methods benefit from aspects of French labor law that are more favorable to strikers than one finds in the backward U.S. of A, the overall strategy can certainly find its uses in other countries.

Jack X writes:

"The Ward Churchill Example
Media Profits and Manipulation as Pathology

Jack X

On September 11, 2001, immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, renowned author and academic Ward Churchill wrote a stream of consciousness essay in response to the events. The essay, titled, “Some People Push Back” on the Justice of Roosting Chickens, was written at a point in American history when emotions ran through the roof, and it seems that Churchill felt the need to put a logical argument on the table concerning a dangerous United States foreign policy. In the article, he very correctly pointed out that, as the inhabitants of the land occupied by the United States, we bear responsibility for the actions of the US government. As Churchill states in the piece, “All told, Iraq has a population of about 18 million. The 500,000 kids lost to date thus represent something on the order of 25 percent of their age group.” This statement was said over two years before the 2003 invasion of Iraq which has accounted for exponentially more civilian casualties.

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