Video to See, Radio To Hear, Letters To Read And More

May 18th, 2008 - by: danny

WATCH: I will be going on Laura Flanders great new TV show, GRIT TV on Monday.
It is on Free Speech TV and the web.

LISTEN, LEARN: THE GIANT POOL OF MONEY (THIS AMERICAN LIFE)

PHONES FOR CHANGE

Nalaka Gunawadene writes:

On this World Telecommunication and Information Society Day (May 17), I have a confession to make. I carry a murder weapon on my person every day and night, and I go to bed with it next to me within easy reach. I rely on it for my work, my leisure and my pleasure. I won’t part with it under any circumstances.

Neither would more than billion people worldwide — or half of humanity.

While at it, let me repeat one of my favorite questions: how is it that not a single development donor or UN agency foresaw the phenomenal rise of mobile phones in the majority world, and instead bet all their ICT money on computers and internet?).

It’s also worth noting that hard core development activists were initially against mobile phones, arguing instead for more public payphones, especially in rural areas. Only very recently have they started acknowledging that, just maybe, mobile phone can create or improve jobs, generate incomes and move millions out of poverty. In the humanitarian sector, as I wrote in October 2007, aid workers are still uncertain how to make best use of mobiles in their relief work.

READ: THE WORLD’S SPOOKIEST WEAPONS (POPULAR SCIENCE)

Iron Man Lives!

YOUR LETTERS

Helen Goldfarb writes from Toronto Canada:

Perhaps everyone connected with this “crime” should be tried as a terrorist. They’ve certainly caused as much trouble around the world as any terrorist. They knew what they were doing was not “kosher” but money talks and they were making it hand over fist. I’m also very annoyed that those in government who should have been overseeing this did absolutely nothing.

Jim Veeder writes

“in regards to your article “is Who becomes the Next President All that matters?”, I am so glad that you wrote that, that general idea has certainly been on my mind lately

One addition: I think Bill Clinton once said something to the effect that he had thought being president would mean that he would be the boss with no
boss above him but he soon learned that everybody has a boss, and that his was the Bond market.

The incredible size of the military/intelligence complex, as detailed by Chalmers Johnson in THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE…are those guys, like the computer
HAL in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, going to allow themselves to be unplugged? I don’t think so. Look at what happened to JFK shortly after he promised
to smash the CIA into a million pieces.

ON IN DEBT WE TRUST

Ron Pero writes:

I work as a real estate agent and so I am exposed to many different peoples financial situations when they are deciding to buy a house. What I see is that the majority of americans have fallen into the traps of consumerism and living beyond their means and damaging their credit. What is very interesting to me is that people who come to this country from other countries don’t seem to have this problem. In most cases these people make less money than their american counterparts. They also have less education at least in the american education system and in most cases they have a large language barrier to overcome. Yet these people do not tend to use consumer credit at all. They tend to have very strong patterns of saving and living within their means and therefore paying bills and debts on time and exactly as agreed.

My question is, why is it that non native american citizens are so able to live in this society and propsper and be very successful while native american citizens seem for the most part to be unable to do so?

Another Real Estate Maven Joanne Steele writes from Upstate New York

Hey, how are you and your family doing? These endless primaries that block any real news of how we’re getting economically raped and pillaged by the ruling class’ war and control of our fake democracy! Hard to break through! Well, we’re not dead yet! Here’s a letter to our local daily newspaper that I wrote on May 6th. I called the publisher on the 12th asking if they received it and his secretary with a halting voice said they d..d..did. By the 18th, it is still not published. Big surprise.

Here it is, damit! I titled it “Killer Capitalism.” Pssst! Pass it on!

Very briefly, capitalism is the transfer of wealth from the poor (eg the wealth created by labor) to the rich, making them richer and us poorer. The basic “faith” of capitalism is selfishness and greed. No religion values either as good. Some of the time, a person (owner-capitalist) is ethical and pays fair, even living, wages to the non-owner workers. Unfortunately, there is no enforcement of this. Minimum wage is neither fair and certainly not a living wage, and it is scantily enforced. There is no maximum wage which would discipline greed and selfishness.

New calculations of IRS data by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty show that over the last 30 years income increased 240 percent for the wealthiest 1 percent while for the rest of us, the bottom 90 percent, it increased only 10 percent. Between 2005 and 2006 they found that the average income adjusted for inflation of the top 1 percent grew by $73,000 while the rest of us got $20, that’s twenty bucks. (In 2006 the top 1 percent were those with incomes above $375,000 and the rest of us were those with incomes below $105,000.) Clearly, the rules that govern income growth in our economy are rigged in favor of the already rich.

United for a Fair Economy notes: “…in the three decades after World War II, incomes for the top 1 percent grew only 25 percent, while for the bottom 90 percent they grew 92 percent. Among the rules that changed between then and now are union-busting, trade liberalization, deregulation and tilted tax policies.” Given this economic history, it’s past time to change them back!

How does your candidate for President stand on any of these issues? In updating the Catholic Church’s mission, Pope Benedict XVI issued seven new sins, including social injustice, causing poverty, and extreme wealth.

Joanne Steele

Ellen GALE on “The first Rodeo:”

An interesting phenomenon is afoot — that would be the foot-soldiers, the Obama-ites who handle the phones and visit the neighborhoods with Obama’s message. The talk is that generally, they are well-received. We’ve been told that the voters who answer their doorbells, accept campaign literature and listen to the Obama-pitch, are most often friendly.

I said most often. After all, this is America, and no national campaign for a black candidate would be complete without the occasional “niggalova” shouted from a passing car, the occasional bumpkin excoriating campaign workers about “darkies.” Stuff like this has happened this campaign season, mostly in Indiana. One Hoosier State Obama campaign office was vandalized and spray-painted with the usual ire against people who won’t keep with their own kind.

We’ve heard very little about incidents like these, although one can be sure that to a young, inexperienced campaign worker, they’re quite traumatizing. For many of Obama’s foot-soldiers, this is their first rodeo, and many haven’t yet developed the thick skin required of the intrepid campaign canvasser.

But the main reason why we’ve not heard much about these incidents is that Obama’s pitch requires that they be minimized. Obama compares voters who won’t vote for him because he’s black with voters who won’t vote for McCain because of his accent. If this is wishful thinking, he’s surely banking on it. Indeed, the entire Democratic Party is banking on it, literally and figuratively. Ready or not, we’re about to sign on the dotted line that America is ready for a black president, and grainy-footage “Mississippi Burning” incidents would damage this claim. Of course, if Hillary were interested in pluming new depths of depravity, she could unearth a few traumatized Obama-ites, discuss their experience with faux sympathy, insinuating that, damp hankies and indignation aside, America will not be sending Denzel to Washington anytime soon.

Trevor Burrowes writes:

In spite of intractable issues, small but valuable things can be done by the next president. I disagree that money needs to be thrown at our problems, even if it doesn’t lead to solutions. The lack of money invites creativity. A rough but useful start can be made to find a systematic and coherent way to address national and international problems — and there’s more than enough money for that.

YOGA ON LINE
Sylvia Ewing, my friend in Chicago has produced yoga videos now up on You Tube

JOURNALISM WORTH READING

Silva J.A. Talvi with an important crime story connected with corporate prisons.

FISH REPORT: FROM THE RIVERKEEPER (HUDSON RIVER, NY)

Response to Report of Fish Declines in the Hudson

For the first time in 19 years, American shad will not be served at Riverkeeper’s annual Shad Festival and Hudson River Celebration. In response to a recent study showing a 90% drop in shad numbers in the Hudson over the last 20 years, Riverkeeper has decided to use the findings to help educate its members and the public about the plight of “America’s founding fish,” as writer John McPhee once dubbed them.

Riverkeeper’s shad festival is the only one in the valley that will not be serving the legendary fish. Riverkeeper is also launching a new campaign to rescue the shad — and nine other imperiled Hudson River fish — and restore their numbers to sustainable levels. (Thanks To Renee Cho for this)

GUILTY AS CHARGED

LA TIMES BLOG: Obesity Causes Global Warming?

That pesky obesity thing. First it forced Disneyland to increase the sizes of its theme-park costumes, and hospitals to buy larger hoists and beds. Now, in a letter published Friday in the medical journal Lancet, two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass — and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat. “Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,” write the authors, Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts of the evocatively named London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

MEMORIES

Thanks for reading, and hopefully encouraging others to subscribe to the News Dissector Blog. Your active help is welcome.

I am thinking of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X today because they were both born on May 19th. I visited Ho’s Masoleum in Hanoi and watched scores of Vietnamese tear up as they passed his remains. He was definitely one of the legendary leaders of the 20th Century but didn’t live to see his country unified. The Pentagon was unable, try as they did to defeat his forces.

What he would think of Vietnam’s increasingly capitalist economy is another question.

I also had the privilege of meeting and having several conversations with Malcolm X, the first public figure, by the way to use the phrase “chickens coming home to roost” in reference to violence in America leading to the assassination of JFK. (Ironically, the infamous Rev Wright says that when he used it, he was quoting an Iraqi official.)

That story is told in my book News Dissector(Akashic Books), and my latest film A WORK IN PROGRESS: a self-dissection The film is available from Globalvision.

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