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This feature on Mute argues that in the most substantial ways, Bitcoin is a continuation of, not alternative to, money and the systemic violence and inequality it guarantees.JosieM | U | T | E | __ rrrrrread it!________________________________________________22 February 2012_Bitcoin - Finally Fair Money?Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency deploying peer-to-peernetworking to enable secure and anonymous transactions without a centralbank. Unlike many economic commentators, The Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society and Scott Len take the currency seriously but ask, how exactly does it differ from 'real' money?http://linkme2.net/ra*

<http://www.zerohedge.com/news/its-official-greece-unveils-negative-salary>It's Official - Greece Unveils The Negative Salary, And A Whole NewMeaning For "Pay To Play" Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/22/2012 09:07 -0500 BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics GreeceWe thought we had seen it all. It turns out we hadn't. It appears thatstarting this month, some Greeks will have to pay for the privilege ofhaving a job. From the Press Project:Salary cutbacks (called "unified payroll") for contract workers at thepublic sector set to be finalized today. Cuts to be validretroactively since november 2011. Expected result: Up to 64.000people will work without salary this month, or even be asked to returnmoney. Amongst them 21.000 teachers, 13.000 municipal employees and30.000 civil servants.Needless to say the BLS is salivating at the prospect of US workerspaying for a job, as this will immediately allow them to double countsaid person's role in the employed part of the labor force (whichincidentally has shrunk by 1% in the time it took to write this), asthe money said "worker" pays can be used in the BLS hedonic models to theoretically "hire many more people courtesy of fractional reservelending. Now if only everyone would agree to pay for the joy ofplaying Solitaire 9 to 5, then all the world's problems would besolved.

Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Étienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell.Save the Greeks from their Saviors!February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Anastazia Golemi.http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-their-saviors/At a time when one Greek youth is unemployed. Where 25,000 homeless wander the streets of Athens. Where 30% of the population has fallen under the poverty line and where millions of families are forced to place their children in the care of someone else in order for them not to die of hunger or cold, where refugees and the new poor compete for trashcans at the public dump, the “saviors” of Greece, under the pretext that “Greece is not trying hard enough”, impose a new aid plan that doubles the lethal administered dose. A plan that abolishes the right to work and reduces the poor to the most extreme misery, at the same time as it makes the middle class disappear.The goal is not about “saving” Greece. All economists worthy of this name agree on this point. It’s about gaining time in order to save the creditors at the same time it leads the country into deferred collapse. Above all it’s about making a laboratory of social change out of Greece that, in a second generation, will spread throughout all of Europe. The model experimented upon Greece is one where public social services, schools, hospitals, and dispensaries fall into ruin, where health becomes the privilege of the rich, and where vulnerable populations are doomed to a programmed elimination while those who work are condemned to the most extreme conditions of impoverishment and precarity.But in order for this neo-liberalist offensive to achieve its ends, it is necessary to install a regime established an economy of the most basic democratic rights. Under the injunction of saviors, we see throughout Europe technocratic governments installing themselves with disregard for popular sovereignty. This is a turning point in the parliamentary system where we see the “representatives of the people” giving carte blanche to the experts and bankers, abdicating their supposed decisional power –A kind of parliamentary coup d’etat, which also uses an amplified arsenal against popular protest. Thus, when members have ratified the convention dictated by the troika (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), diametrically opposed to the mandate for which they had received power, without any democratic legitimacy, it will have committed to the future of the country for thirty or forty years.Meanwhile the EU is preparing to establish an account which would be paid directly to aid Greece but only so that it is used for servicing the debt. The revenue of the country should be the "absolute priority" devoted to repay creditors, and, if necessary, paid directly to the account managed by the European Union. The agreement stipulates that any new bond issued under it shall be governed by English law, which involves material guarantees, so that disputes will be adjudicated by the courts of Luxembourg, having Greece waive in advance any rights to appeal against an entry determined by its creditors. To complete the picture, privatization is assigned to a fund managed by the troika, where the title deeds of public goods shall be placed. In short, it is the widespread looting, characteristic of financial capitalism which here offers itself a really beautiful institutional consecration. To the extent that sellers and buyers sit on the same side of the table, we have no doubt that this enterprise of privatization is a real treat for the buyers. But all the measures taken so far have only dug Greece into deeper sovereign debt. With the help of rescuers who lend at exorbitant rates, it has literally exploded into free fall in approaching 170% of GDP, while in 2009 it represented more than 120%. It is likely that this cohort of rescuers - whenever presented as "final" - had no other purpose than to weaken further still the position of Greece so that, deprived of any opportunity to propose itself the terms of a restructuring, is reduced to yield to all its creditors under the blackmail of "the disaster or austerity."The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the "enemy", are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved.Thus, the weakness of a country caught between speculation and endless devastating bailouts, is the backdoor through which a new social model erupts conforming to the requirements of neoliberal fundamentalism. A model destined for all Europe and maybe elsewhere. This is the real issue and why defending the Greek people can not be reduced to a gesture of solidarity or abstract humanity: the future of democracy and the fate of European nations are in question. Everywhere the "pressing necessity" of "painful but salutary" austerity will be presented to us as the means to escape the fate of Greece, while it really leads us right into the middle of it.Up against this attack against society, faced with the destruction of the last pockets of democracy, we call our fellow citizens, our French and European friends to speak loudly. Do not leave the monopoly on speaking to the experts and politicians. Can we remain indifferent to the fact the German and French leaders in particular have requested Greece to be banned from elections? Does the systematic stigmatization and bashing of a European people not deserve a response? Is it possible not to raise ones voice against the institutional assasination of the Greek people? And can we remain silent in front of the establishment of a forced march towards a system that outlaws the very idea of social solidarity?We are at the point of no return. It is urgent to fight the battle of numbers and the war of words to counter ultra-liberal rhetoric of fear and misinformation. There is urgent need to deconstruct the moral lessons that obscure the actual process at work in society. It becomes more than urgent to demystify the racist insistence on the " Greek specificity " that allegedly is the supposed national character of a people (laziness and cunning at will) the root cause of a crisis in global reality. What matters today is not the specifics, wheher they are real or imaginary, but the common: the fate of a people that will affect all others.Numerous technical solutions have been proposed to overcome the alternative of "either the destruction of the society or bankruptcy" (which we see today really means "and the destruction and bankruptcy" of the company). Everything must be brought to the table as food for thought for the construction of another Europe. But first you must report the crime, bring to light the situation in which the Greek people is because of "rescue packages" designed by and for speculators and creditors. When a movement of support is woven around the world, where Internet networks buzz with initiatives of solidarity, are French intellectuals the last to raise their voices for Greece? Without further delay, multiply articles, media appearances, debates, petitions, demonstrations. For any initiative is welcome, any initiative is urgent.As for us, this is what we propose: quickly move towards the formation of a European community of intellectuals and artists in solidarity with the Greek people in resistance. If we can’t do this, then who will? If we don’t do this now, then when?Vicky Skoumbi, Editor-in-Chief of the journal, “Alètheia”, Athens, Michel Surya, director of the journal «Lignes», Paris, Dimitris Vergetis, director of the journal, “Alètheia”, Athens. And : Daniel Alvara, Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Etienne Balibar, Fernanda Bernardo, Barbara Cassin, Bruno Clément, Danielle Cohen- Levinas, Yannick Courtel, Claire Denis, Georges Didi-Huberman, Roberto Esposito, Francesca Isidori, Pierre-Philippe Jandin, Jérôme Lèbre, Jean-Clet Martin, Jean- Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Judith Revel, Elisabeth Rigal, Jacob Rogozinski, Hugo Santiago, Beppe Sebaste, Michèle Sinapi, Enzo Traverso.

SOLIDARITY AND ITS DISCONTENTSby Raha Iranian Feminist Collectivesacw.net - 23 Feb 2012(originally published on jadaliyya.com)While building solidarity between activists in the U.S. and Iran canbe a powerful way of supporting social justice movements in Iran,progressives and leftists who want to express solidarity with Iraniansare challenged by a complicated geopolitical terrain. The U.S.government shrilly decries Iran???s nuclear power program and expands along-standing sanctions regime on the one hand, and Iranian PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad makes inflammatory proclamations and harshlysuppresses Iranian protesters and dissidents on the other. Solidarityactivists are often caught between a rock and a hard place, and manychoose what they believe are the ???lesser evil??? politics. In the caseof Iran, this has meant aligning with a repressive state leader underthe guise of ???anti-imperialism??? and ???populism,??? or supporting???targeted??? sanctions.As members of a feminist collective founded in part to support themassive post-election protests in Iran in 2009, while opposing allforms of US intervention, we take this opportunity to reflect on themeaning and practice of transnational solidarity between US-basedactivists and sections of Iranian society. In this article, we look atthe remarkable situation in which both protests against andexpressions of support for Ahmadinejad are articulated under thebanner of support for the ???Iranian people.??? In particular, we examinethe claims of critics of the Iranian regime who have advocated the useof ???targeted sanctions??? against human rights violators in the Iraniangovernment as a method of solidarity. Despite their name, thesesanctions trickle down to punish broader sections of the population.They also stand as a stunning example of American power and hypocrisy,since no country dare sanction the US for its illegal wars, torturepractices and program of extrajudicial assassinations. We then assessthe positions of some ???anti-imperialist??? activists who not only opposewar and sanctions on Iran but also defend Ahmadinejad as a populistpresident expressing the will of the majority of the Iranian people.In fact, Ahmadinejad???s aggressive neo-liberal economic policiesrepresent a right-wing attack on living standards and on varioussocial welfare provisions established after the revolution. Andfinally, we offer an alternative notion of and method for buildinginternational solidarity ???from below,??? one that offers a way out of???lesser evil??? politics and turns the focus away from the state andonto those movement activists in the streets.We hope the analysis that follows will provoke much needed discussionamong a broad range of activists, journalists and scholars about howto rethink a practice of transnational solidarity that does nothomogenize entire populations, cast struggling people outside the USas perpetual and helpless victims, or perpetuate unequal powerrelations between peoples and nations. Acts of solidarity that crossborders must be based on building relationships with activists indisparate locations, on an understanding of the different issues andconditions of struggle various movements face, and on exchanges ofsupport among grassroots activists rather than governments, with eachgroup committed to opposing oppression locally as well as globally.The spectrum of protestNumerous protests and actions took place over the week ofAhmadinejad???s UN visit in September 2010, with at least eight activistgroups organizing protests on the day of his General Assemblyaddress???all claiming to speak in the interests of the Iranian people.However, despite some commonalities, these voices represented verydifferent political approaches and agendas. Whether clearlyarticulated or not, one major fault line was on the question of theappropriate US and international role in relation to Iran, especiallyon the issues of sanctions and war.The protests gaining the most media attention were organized by anewly-formed coalition called Iran180 and by the Mojahedin-e Khalq(PMOI). Both take a hard line, pro-sanctions position on Iran.Iran180, launched by the Jewish Community Relations Council of NewYork, organized a press conference under the banner ???human rights, notnuclear rights.??? The PMOI on the other hand, held a large rally ofreportedly 2000 participants from far and wide. The PMOI is anorganization known for its militant opposition to the Iranian regimeand its anti-democratic, cult-like structure; it has been largelydiscredited among Iranians and is also listed as a ???terrorist???organization by the State Department. Speakers included former mayorRudy Giuliani, former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, and BritishTory MP David Amess, all calling for a hard line on Iran andapparently positioning the PMOI as the legitimate diasporicalternative to the current Iranian leadership.By contrast, Where???s My Vote-NY (WIMV), an organization formed toexpress solidarity with Iranian protests after the contested electionin 2009, called for protection of human rights in Iran but also tookan explicit no war and no sanctions position, making them the onlyorganization to do so. WIMV???s strong anti-sanctions stance has beencontroversial among some human rights activists in the US who havesupported so-called ???humanitarian sanctions??? that are supposed totarget individual Iranian human rights violators. In fact, HumanRights Watch and Amnesty International pulled out of a WIMV-organizedprotest in September 2009 precisely because they refused to endorse ano sanctions platform. Below we size up the efficacy of ???humanitariansanctions??? that claim to be in support of the human rights ofIranians.The record on ???humanitarian??? sanctionsplaced what amounted to crippling financial and trade sanctions onIraq in an ostensible effort to weaken Saddam Hussein???s authoritarianregime. Sanctions, we were told, amounted to a humane way of combatingintransigent authoritarianism around the world while avoiding massbloodshed. The results of that strategy should have shattered theseillusions for good. The complete collapse of the Iraqi economy duringthirteen years of sanctions coupled with the inability of ordinaryIraqi people to access banned items necessary for their day-to-daysurvival???such as ambulances and generators???led to over half a millionIraqi civilian deaths. Furthermore, the sanctions were an utterfailure in their purported primary goal???thwarting the Hussein regimewhile avoiding full-scale war. Not only was Hussein not dislodged bythe sanctions, but he also managed to consolidate power throughout the???90s while resorting to increasingly autocratic means of suppressingdissent. Finally, in March 2003, the United States and a small???coalition of the willing??? began a full-scale military intervention inIraq, which has shredded the fabric of Iraqi society and left anetwork of permanent US military bases???and Western oilcompanies???behind.Despite the benefit of this hindsight, we are being told again totrust in the humanitarian aims of a state-sponsored sanctions effortas an alternative to war, this time against the Islamic Republic ofIran. In fact, some form of sanctions against the Islamic Republichave been in place with little effect for over thirty years. But sincePresident Barack Obama took office, the sanctions have been amped upto new heights. In June of 2010, a US-led United Nations coalitionpassed the fourth round of economic and trade sanctions against theIslamic Republic since 2006. The stated goal: limiting Iran???s nuclearprogram. Soon after, the European Union imposed its own set ofeconomic sanctions. A month later, President Obama signed into law themost extensive sanctions regime Iran has ever seen with theComprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Divestment Act of 2010(CISADA).It should not be surprising, given the United States??? historicattempts at controlling Iranian oil, that CISADA???s primary target isthe management of the Iranian petroleum industry. These sanctionswould penalize any foreign company that sells refined petroleumproducts to Iran, which are a necessity for Iran???s primary industry aswell as for the everyday functioning of modern life. This winter,shortages of imported refined gasoline forced the Iranian governmentto convert petro-chemical plants into makeshift refineries thatproduce fuel loaded with dangerous particles. As a result, the capitalcity of Tehran has been plagued by unprecedented levels of pollution,shutting down schools and businesses for days at a time and leading toskyrocketing rates of respiratory illnesses and at least 3,641pollution-related deaths.Further, Iran???s ability to import and export vital goods has beenprofoundly curtailed because the most powerful Western-based freightinsurance companies???many of which worked with Iran until these mostrecent sanctions???can no longer do business with any company based inthe Islamic Republic. Without insurance coverage, most internationalports refuse any Iranian ships entry because they are not covered forpotential damages. The current round of U.S.-led sanctions have hadthe effect of cutting off more of Iranian businesses because foreigncompanies are simply unsure of whether or not their business issanctioned. As a stipulation of the US, EU, and UN sanctions, nocorporations or private individuals can do business with the majorityof Iranian banks or industries. Parts and supplies for a great deal ofmachinery???and not only those potentially associated with nuclearindustry???are denied entry into Iran; indeed, one of the deadlyexamples of the effects of these sanctions in recent years has beenthe spate of commercial Iranian aircrafts that have crashed due tofaulty or out-of-date parts. These measures have already haddisastrous effects on the Iranian economy and the health ordinaryIranian citizens, adding to historic levels of inflation, unemploymentand pollution-related illness.Despite mounting evidence warning against the humanitarian disaster ofunilateral, state-engineered sanctions, many people outside of Iranare still compelled to support them as a diplomatic alternative towar. The operating principle behind such a belief is that thesesanctions???unlike those wielded against Iraq, which limited all facetsof the economic life of the nation???only target certain individuals,groups, and aspects of economic life. In the case of the IslamicRepublic, the argument goes, these individuals and groups are directlylinked to the state, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps(IRGC???or Sepah Pasdaran) and the paramilitary Basij forces, which doindeed command much of the economic resources of the Islamic Republic.Unfortunately, the reality of even ???targeted??? sanctions is not nearlyso rosy. To see why this strategy is almost certain to be a failure,we consider the recent example of Zimbabwe.Since 2001, there has been a similar set of so-called ???smart???sanctions in place against Zimbabwe in an effort to weaken PresidentRobert Mugabe and to force him to join a coalition government with hisprincipal political opponents. In the decade after the imposition ofthese sanctions, Zimbabwe has suffered enormously, experiencing one ofthe most cataclysmic instances of hyperinflation in history,skyrocketing unemployment rates, a startling lack of basicnecessities, a rapidly growing income disparity, and the rise of ablack market for goods that only an elite few can access. Indeed, thestory in Zimbabwe is remarkably similar to that in Iraq: in both casesthe authoritarian state only increased its power as a result of theeconomic stranglehold on the country due to its monopoly over all ofthe available wealth and resources in the nation. As the Iraqi andZimbabwe cases demonstrate, sanctions are not an effective means toavoid war, nor do they inevitably undermine repressive andauthoritarian states. Most importantly of all, they further immiseratethe very people they claim to be helping.Often, these failed examples are countered by one historic successstory, namely, the divestment and sanctions movement against apartheidSouth Africa???a very compelling instance of international solidaritywith a mass domestic opposition movement. Is this an apt analogy forthe Iranian case? A crucial difference is that sanctions against SouthAfrica came only after a divestment campaign led by South Africanactivists, which succeeded in convincing a great deal of privatecapital to flee the country before US or UN involvement. As a tacticdeveloped and deployed within South Africa, sanctions were not theresult of power machinations between antagonistic states or a strategythat enhanced US global dominance.Iran presents a very different situation. No member of any Iran-basedopposition group???from leaders of the ???green??? movement, to activists inthe women???s and student movement, to labor organizers???have called foror supported the US/UN/EU sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Onthe contrary, leaders from virtually all of these groups have vocallyopposed the implementation of sanctions precisely because they havewitnessed the Iranian state grow stronger, and the wellbeing ofordinary Iranians suffer, as a result. Imposing sanctions in the nameof ???human rights,??? as the US did for the first time this fall, doesn???talter these outcomes. The US government???s long record of eithercomplicity with or silence regarding the treatment of dissidents inIran???from the 1950s when it helped train the brutal SAVAK torturesquads right through to the post-election crackdown in 2009???makes itnothing if not hypocritical on the issue of human rights in Iran.The spectrum of supportIn stark contrast to the range of groups protesting the Iranianpresident and the Islamic Republic???s policies, some 130 activists fromanti-war, labor and anti-racist organizations took an altogetherdifferent approach in September 2010, attending a dinner withAhmadinejad hosted by the Iranian Mission to the UN. According to oneattendee, the goal of the dinner was to ???share our hopes for peace andjustice with the Iranian people through their president and his wife.???During two and half hours of speeches, activists embraced Ahmadinejadas an ally and partner in the global struggle for peace and, with fewexceptions, ignored the fact that his administration is responsiblefor a brutal crackdown on dissent in Iran (click here for one notableexception).Rather than listening to the millions of Iranians who protested unfairelections and political repression, these activists heard only thesiren song of Ahmadinejad???s ???anti-imperialist??? stance, his vehementcriticism of Israel and his statements about US government complicitywith the September 11th attacks. Their credibility as consistentsupporters of social justice has been shipwrecked in the process. Manyof these groups are numerically small organizations with histories ofdenying atrocities carried out by heads of state that oppose USdomination.[1] But some attendees are national figures, such as formerUS Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate CynthiaMcKinney, who has been a beacon of principled opposition toneo-liberalism and the ???war on terror.??? While it is important not tolump all of the groups and individuals together as sharing the sameset of political ideologies or organizing strategies, we need toinvestigate the reasons that these activists showed up to expresssupport for the current Iranian regime. Below we take up the mostcommon reasons attendees expressed for standing with the regime???thatit has populist economic policies benefiting workers and the poor, isanti-imperialist and pro-Palestine.Do Ahmadinejad???s policies support Iranian workers and the poor?One of the most bewildering misrepresentations of Ahmadinejad outsideIran has been around his economic policies, which are oftenrepresented by the US left as populist or even pro-working class. Inreality, the extent and the speed of privatization in Iran underAhmadinejad has been unprecedented, and disastrous, for the majorityof the Iranian people. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)???s reporton the Iranian state???s neo-liberal policies glows with approval,confirming once again that the Fund has no problem supportingundemocratic attacks on the living standards of ordinary people.Privatization in Iran has happened under government/military control.State-affiliated actors, mainly Sepah, have bought a huge share of thecountry???s economic institutions and contracts???from small companies allthe way to the largest national corporations such astelecommunications, oil and gas. Recently, despite vast oppositioneven from the parliament, the government annulled gasoline and foodsubsidies that have been in place for decades. Gas prices quadruped,while the price of bread tripled, almost overnight. This is an attackon workers and the poor of historic proportions that had been in theworks for many years but was delayed due to fear of a popularbacklash. It was only under conditions of extreme militarization andsuppression of dissent that Ahmadinejad???s administration could finallyimplement this plan. Arguing that subsidies should go only to thosethe regime decides are deserving, the government will now be able touse this massive budget to reward supporters and/or buy loyalty. Themassive unregulated import of foreign products, especially from China,has made it impossible for agricultural and industrial domesticproducers to survive. Import venues are mainly controlled by thegovernment and Sepah, which profit enormously from their monopolies.These hasty and haphazard developments have severely destabilizedIran???s economy in the past few years, leading to rocketing inflation(25-30%) and growing poverty. Unemployment is very high; no officialstatistics are available but rough estimates are around 30%, creatingfertile ground for recruitment into the state???s military and policeapparatus (similar to the ???poverty draft??? in the United States).Is the Ahmadinejad administration anti-imperialist?The 1978???79 revolution was one of the most inspiring popular uprisingsagainst imperialism and homegrown despotism the world has seen,successfully wresting Iran away from US control over Iranian oilfieldsand ending its role as a watchdog for US interests in the region.Denunciations of American imperialism were a unifying rallying cry andformed a key pillar of revolutionary ideology. However, in the morethat thirty years since, the Iranian government has, like all nations,ruthlessly pursued its interests on the world stage. Despite itsanti-American/anti-imperialist rhetoric, Iran cannot survive withoutcapital investment from and trade with other ???imperial??? nations,without integration into a world market that is ordered according tothe relative military and economic strength of various states. Witnessthe large oil, gas, and development contracts granted to Russia andChina, and the way that these countries, as well as France andGermany, have cashed in on the Iranian consumer goods market. TheIslamic government has even cut deals with the US, such as during theinfamous Iran-Contra episode, when it served its interests. USopposition to Iran???s nuclear program, and multiple rounds ofsanctions, should be understood as part of the American effort tore-exert control over this geo-politically strategic country andre-enter the race for Iranian energy resources and markets from whichit has been shut out.Iran???s foreign policy cannot and should not be reduced to oneindividual???s inflammatory speeches. In fact, the same Ahmadinejad whograbs western media headlines by criticizing the US is the firstIranian president to send a letter directly to a US presidentrequesting a new era of diplomacy, something unthinkable underprevious administrations. Diplomacy, to be clear, carries with it thegoal of re-entering a direct relationship with the so-called ???GreatSatan.??? Far from acting as an outpost of anti-imperialism, theAhmadinejad administration is maneuvering to cut the best dealpossible and to renegotiation its place in the global hierarchy ofnations. Given its massive oil and gas resources and strategiclocation, Iran would likely be playing a far more significant andpowerful role if not for decades of isolation, sanctions and hostilityfrom the US. It is in the Iranian governments interests to break thisstranglehold. Its strategy is to play all cards possible in extendingits regional influence in smaller and weaker countries, such asLebanon and the occupied territories of Palestine. As MohammadKhazaee, the Iranian ambassador to the UN told the New York Times,Iran is a regional ???heavyweight??? and deserves to be treated as such.The Iranian government???s support for Palestinians also scores it majorpoints with many leftists in the US and around the world. Again, it iscrucial to see through the rhetoric and examine the more complex aimsand effects of Iran???s policies. While the Iranian government does sendmaterial aid to Palestinians suffering under Israeli blockades and inrefugee camps in Lebanon, they have also manipulated the situationquite cynically for purposes that have nothing to do with Palestinianliberation. Using money to buy support from Palestinians, andfinancing and arming the Hezbollah army in Lebanon, are crucial waysthe Islamic Republic exerts its influence in the region.There is no mechanism for Palestinians or Lebanese people, who areimpacted by Iran???s actions, to have any say in how Iran intervenes intheir struggles, even when the results are harmful. For instance,Ahmadinejad???s holocaust denials undermine the credibility ofPalestinian efforts to oppose Israeli apartheid by reinforcing thefalse equation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. At the 2001 UNconference against racism in Durban, South Africa, an anti-Zionistcoalition emerged and got a hearing. But at the 2009 conference inGeneva, Ahmadinejad???s speech on the first day overshadowed the wholeconference and undermined any possible critique of Israel, creating aserious set back for the anti-Zionist movement.Relentless state propaganda about Palestine coming from an unpopularregime has tragically resulted in the Iranian people???s alienation fromthe Palestinian???s struggle for freedom. Leaving aside the hypocrisy ofAhmadinejad claiming to care about the rights of Palestinians whiletrampling on those of his own citizens, the policy of sendinghumanitarian aid to Palestinians while impoverishing Iranians hasproduced massive domestic resentment. In an article on The ElectronicIntifada, Khashayar Safavi attempted to link the pro-democracy Iranianopposition to broader questions of justice in the region. ???We are nottraitors, nor pro-American, nor Zionist ???agents,?????? he wrote,responding to Ahmadinejad???s verbal attacks on the movement, ???[W]emerely want the same freedom to live, to exist and to resist as wedemand for the Palestinians and for the Lebanese.??? Unfortunately,sections of the US left support the self-determination of Palestinianswhile undermining that of Iranians by supporting Ahmadinejad???sgovernment. We now look at some of the key problems of Ahmadinejad???sgovernment, exposing the high cost of aligning with repressive stateleaders.Harsh realities for labor and other social justice organizing in IranCurrently no form of independent organizing, political or economic, istolerated in Iran. Attempts at organizing workers and labor unionshave been particularly subject to violent repression. The crushing ofthe bus drivers??? union, one of the rare attempts at independentunionizing in the last few decades, is one of the better-knownexamples. The story of Mansour Osanloo, one of the main organizers ofthe syndicate, illustrates the incredible pressure and cruelty labororganizers and their families experience at the hands of the regime.In June 2010, his pregnant daughter-in-law was attacked and beaten upby pro-regime thugs while getting on subway. They took her with themby force and after hours of torture, left her under a bridge inTehran. She was in dire health and had a miscarriage. These unofficialsecurity forcescontinued to harass her at home in order to putpsychological pressure on Osanloo, who is still in prison and is notyielding to the government???s demands to stop organizing. Currently,even conservative judiciary officials are complaining about violationsof their authority by parallel security and military forces who arrestpeople, conduct interrogations and carry out torture, pressure judgesto issue harsh sentences, and are implicated in the suspicious murdersof dissidents. (In the past few months, not only political dissidents,but even physicians who have witnessed some of the tortures orconsequences of them, have been murdered.)No opposition parties are allowed to function. No independent media???nonewspapers magazines, radio or television stations???can survive, otherthan websites that must constantly battle government censorship. Theprisons are full of journalists and activists from across Iraniansociety. Conditions in Iran???s prisons are gruesome. Prisoners aredeprived of any rights or a fair trial, a violation of Iranian law.After the election protests, killing, murder and rape of protestersand prisoners caused a scandal, which resulted in the closing of thenotorious Kahrizak prison. Executions continue, however, as thegovernment has meted out hundreds of death sentences in the last year.Iran has the second highest number of executions among all countriesand the highest number per capita. In January 2011, executions soaredto a rate of one every eight hours.The women???s movement has been another major target of repression inthe past few years. Dozens of activists have been arrested andimprisoned for conducting peaceful campaigns for legal equality; manyhave been forced to flee the country and many more are continuallyharassed and threatened. Women collecting signatures on a petitiondemanding the right to divorce and to child custody are often unfairlyaccused of ???disturbing public order,??? ???threatening national security,???and ???insulting religious values.??? Ahmadinejad???s government employs awide range of patriarchal discourses and policies designed to rollback even small gains achieved by women.Ahmadinejad???s anti-immigrant positions and policies are the harshestof any administration in the past few decades. The largest forcedreturn of Afghan immigrants happened under his government, rippingfamilies apart and forcing thousands across the border (with manydeaths reported in winter due to severe cold). Marriage betweenIranians and Afghan immigrants is not allowed and Afghan children donot have any rights, not even to attend school. Moreover,Ahmadinejad???s government has been repressive toward different ethnicgroups in Iran, particularly Kurds. It is promoting a militaristShia-Islamist-nationalist agenda and escalating Shia-Sunni divisions.Given these realities, how is it that large parts of the US left cansupport Ahmadinejad? We now look at the confusions that make such aposition possible.US left support for AhmadinejadDespite the many differences between the individuals and groupsrepresented at that dinner with Ahmadinejad a few months ago, what theoverwhelming majority of them have in common is a mistaken idea ofwhat it means to be anti-imperialist or anti-war. The sycophanticspeeches at the dinner can be understood as an enactment of the oldadage ???the enemy of my enemy is my friend.??? There are two problemswith this approach. The first is that it equates governments withentire populations, the very mistake the activists at that dinner arealways saying we shouldn???t make when it comes to US society. Thesecond problem is that support for Ahmadinejad means siding with theregime that crushed a democratic people???s movement in Iran. Thisposition pits US-based activists who want to stop a war with Iranagainst the democratic aspirations and struggles of millions ofIranians.Part of the confusion may stem from a distorted notion of what itmeans to speak from inside ???the belly of the beast.??? In other words,the argument goes, those of us in the United States have a foremostresponsibility to oppose the actual and threatened atrocities of ourown government, not to sit in hypocritical judgment over other, lesserstate powers. But in the case of the vicious crackdown on all forms ofdissent inside Iran, not judging is, in practice, silent complicity.If anti-imperialism means the right to only criticize the USgovernment, we end up with a politics that is, ironically, soUS-centric as to undermine the possibility of international solidaritywith people who have to simultaneously stand up to their owndictatorial governments and to the behemoth of US power. The fact thatthe US is the global superpower, and therefore the most dangerousnation-state, does not somehow nullify the oppressive actions of othergovernments. China, for example, is increasingly participating ineconomic imperialism across Asia and Africa, exploiting naturalresources and labor forces well beyond its borders. There is more thanone source of oppression, and even imperialism, in the world. Thenecessity to hold ???our??? government accountable in the US must notpreclude a crucial imperative of solidarity???the ability to understandthe context of other people???s struggles, to stand in their shoes.If any of the activists defending Ahmadinejad would honestly attemptto do this, they might have some disturbing realizations. For example,if those same individuals or groups tried to speak out and organize inIran for their current political agendas???against government targetingof activists, against ballooning military budgets, against mediacensorship, against the death penalty, against a rigged electoralsystem, for labors rights, women???s rights, the rights of sexualminorities and to free political prisoners???they would themselves be injail or worse.Given that these are the issues that guide the work of these leftistsin the US, we must ask: don???t the Iranian people also deserve theright to fight for a progressive agenda of their choosing withoutexecution, imprisonment and torture? As we demand rights for activistshere, don???t we have to support those same rights for activists inIran?Solidarity: concrete and from belowIn the tangle of conflicting messages about who speaks for the ???peopleof Iran??????a diverse population with a range of views and interests???whathas been sorely lacking in the US is a broad-based progressive/leftposition on Iran that supports democratization, judicial transparency,political rights, economic justice, social freedoms andself-determination.There is no contradiction between opposing every instance of USmeddling in Iran???and every other country???and supporting the popular,democratic struggles of ordinary Iranians against dictatorship.Effective international solidarity requires that the two go hand inhand, for example, by linking the struggles of political prisoners inIran and with those of political prisoners in the US, not bycounterposing them. Iranian dissidents, like dissidents in the US, seetheir own government as their main enemy. The fact that Iranianactivists also have to deal with sanctions and threats of militaryaction from the US only makes their work and their lives moredifficult. The US and Iranian governments are, of course, not equal intheir global reach, but both stand in the way of popular democracy andhuman liberation. US-based activists must not undermine the brave andendangered work of Iranian opposition groups by supporting the regimethat is ruthlessly trying to crush them.We are calling for a rethinking of what internationalism andinternational solidarity means from the vantage point of activistsworking in the US. Internationalism has to start from below, from thedifferently articulated aspirations of mass movements against statemilitarism, dictatorship, economic crisis, gender, sexual, religious,class and ethnic oppression, in Iran, in the US and all over theworld.For activists in the US, this means being against sanctions on Iran,whether they are in the name of ???human rights??? or the nuclear issue.It means refusing to cast the US as the land of progress and freedomwhile Iran is demonized as backward and oppressive. Solidarity is notcharity or pity; it flows from an understanding of mutual???though farfrom identical???struggle. It means consistent opposition to humanrights violations in the US, to the rampant sexism and homophobia thatlead to violence and destroy people???s lives right here. But we don???thave to hide another state???s brutality behind our complaints aboutconditions in America. We have to be just as clear in condemning statecrimes against activists, journalists and others in Iran, just ascritical of the Iranian versions of neo-liberalism and oligarchy, ofattacks on trade unions, women and students, as we are of the USversions.For solidarity to be effective, it must be concrete. US-basedactivists need to educate ourselves about Iran???s historic andcontemporary social movements and, as much as possible, buildrelationships with those involved in various opposition groups andactivities in Iran so that our support is thoughtful, appropriate tothe context and, ideally, in response to specific requests initiatedfrom within Iran. It is our hope that these struggles may beincreasingly linked as social justice activists in the US and Iranfind productive ways of working together, as well as in our differentcontexts and locations, towards the similar goals of greater democracyand human liberation.[1] For example, Workers World, ANSWER and several other groups whoshare the same political tradition have historically supported Sovietcrackdowns against popular uprisings in Hungary in 1956 andCzechoslovakia in 1968, the Chinese state???s massacre of unarmedprotesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the ethnic cleansingscarried out by ultra-nationalist Milosevic throughout the 1990s.[available at: http://www.sacw.net/article2549.html]

http:/comisario.net/difusion/INVITO-ruina_consentida.pdfexhibit: _consented ruin_an exhibition that could be an event due to its short duration, although enough to show on an elusive manner the state of affairs on which we find ourselves nowadays.it is titled consented ruin because, while the architectural office fündc was erecting a building in pozuelo de alarcón, the ncc (new cultural center), a worker embedded himself to the construction site crane flaunting a banner that red that motto as a complaint of the lack of payment of his salary. the image, spread by newspapers and television, it is highly representative of the situation in which Spain is at this minute of _consented ruin_the main axis of the show is architecture as she is the first injured party, consenting but victim, of what surrounds us. all that goes along with architecture on this exhibition will help to see where do we find ourselves now.with work of:dsk (juan lesta & belén montero): _península xy. ruta x_ 2011 (premiere in valencia)josé guedes: _sarah/tempo_ 2003ángel rueda: _50 años en el andamio_ 2009césar espada: _relax_ 2012 (absolute premiere)chiara passa: _WAG's plan displacement_ 2012 (absolute premiere)mateo maté: _actos heroicos_ 2011 (premiere in valencia)luis montolío: _españa_ 2012fündc: _tómbola_ 2003-en curso (absolute premiere)nacho chueca: _ruina consentida, stress artístico-social_ 2012 (absolute premiere)curator: nilo casarescuratorial assistance: àngela montesinosassembly: óscar mora, salvia ferrer, césar garcía guerra, paz martín rodríguez y guillermo garcía ruizin collaboration with consorcio de museos de la comunidad valencianaaudiovisuals: vitelsaopening: 20h00m/01.03.12schedule: 10h00m-20h00m/02.03.12-03.03.12hall goerlich from the centre del carme, valencia, españa. http://www.centredelcarme.comhttp:/comisario.net/difusion/INVITO-ruina_consentida.pdf---------------------------------------------------------------------copyleft (todos os direitos ao reve's) nilo casareslife is too short to drink bad wine / la vida es demasiado breve como para beber mal vino / a vida é muito curta para beber vinho mau / la vita è troppo corta per bersi un vino scadente / het leven is te kort om slechte wijn te drinken / zivot je kratak da bi se pilo lose vinobeijos em espiral:: besos en espiral:: besades en espiral:: baisers en spirale:: baci a spirale:: spiral kisses :: spiral kyssar:: spiraalzoenen:: pocalunki spiralowe:: muxu kiribilatuak:: kierteisia suukkoja:: spiralni poljupci:: spiralküsse:: spiraal soenehttp://comisario.nethttp://twitter.com/140_pulsacioneshttp://la.base.de.datos.de.una.parte.de.mi.vida.como.comisario.netif file > 2mb; send it to nilo dot casares at gmail dot com

Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information Society.Towards Critical Theories of Social Media.The Fourth ICTs and Society-Conference.Uppsala University. May 2nd-4th, 2012.Abstract Submission Deadline:Wednesday, Feb 29th, 17:00 CETSubmission guidelines:http://www.icts-and-society.net/events/uppsala2012/With plenary talks by Vincent Mosco, Graham Murdock, Andrew Feenberg, Catherine McKercher, Charles Ess, Christian Christensen, Christian Fuchs, Gunilla Bradley, Mark Andrejevic, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Peter Dahlgren, Tobias Olsson, Trebor Scholz, Ursula Huws, Wolfgang Hofkirchner.This conference provides a forum for the discussion of how to critically study social media and their relevance for critique, democracy, politics and philosophy in 21st century information society.We are living in times of global capitalist crisis. In this situation, we are witnessing a return of critique in the form of a surging interest in critical theories (such as the critical political economy of Karl Marx, critical theory, etc) and revolutions, rebellions, and political movements against neoliberalism that are reactions to the commodification and instrumentalization of everything. On the one hand there are overdrawn claims that social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, mobile Internet, etc) have caused rebellions and uproars in countries like Tunisia and Egypt, which brings up the question to which extent these are claims are ideological or not. On the other hand, the question arises what actual role social media play in contemporary capitalism, power structures, crisis, rebellions, uproar, revolutions, the strengthening of the commons, and the potential creation of participatory democracy. The commodification of everything has resulted also in a commodification of the communication commons, including Internet communication that is today largely commercial in character. The question is how to make sense of a world in crisis, how a different future can look like, and how we can create Internet commons and a commons-based participatory democracy.This conference deals with the question of what kind of society and what kind of Internet are desirable, what steps need to be taken for advancing a good Internet in a sustainable information society, how capitalism, power structures and social media are connected, what the main problems, risks, opportunities and challenges are for the current and future development of Internet and society, how struggles are connected to social media, what the role, problems and opportunities of social media, web 2.0, the mobile Internet and the ubiquitous Internet are today and in the future, what current developments of the Internet and society tell us about potential futures, how an alternative Internet can look like, and how a participatory, commons-based Internet and a co-operative, participatory, sustainable information society can be achieved.Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to:* What does it mean to study the Internet, social media and society in a critical way? What are Critical Internet Studies and Critical Theories of Social Media? What does it mean to study the media and communication critically?* What is the role of the Internet and social media in contemporary capitalism?* How do power structures, exploitation, domination, class, digital labour, commodification of the communication commons, ideology, and audience/user commodification, and surveillance shape the Internet and social media?* How do these phenomena shape concrete platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc?* How does contemporary capitalism look like? What is the role of the Internet and social media in contemporary capitalism?* In what society do we live? What is the actual role of information, ICTs, and knowledge in contemporary society? Are concepts like network society, information society, informational capitalism, etc adequate characterizations of contemporary society or overdrawn claims? What are the fundamental characteristics of contemporary society and which concept(s) should be used for describing this society?* What is digital labour and how do exploitation and surplus value generation work on the Internet? Which forms of exploitation and class structuration do we find on the Internet, how do they work, what are their commonalities and differences? How does the relation between toil and play change in a digital world? How do classes and class struggles look like in 21st century informational capitalism?* What are ideologies of the Internet, web 2.0, and social media? How can they be deconstructed and criticized? How does ideology critique work as an empirical method and theory that is applied to the Internet and social media?* Which philosophies, ethics and which philosophers are needed today in order to understand the Internet, democracy and society and to achieve a global sustainable information society and a participatory Internet? What are perspectives for political philosophy and social theory in 21st century information society?* What contradictions, conflicts, ambiguities, and dialectics shape 21st century information society and social media?* What theories are needed for studying the Internet, social media, web 2.0, or certain platforms or applications in a critical way?* What is the role of counter-power, resistance, struggles, social movements, civil society, rebellions, uproars, riots, revolutions, and political transformations in 21st century information society and how (if at all) are they connected to social media?* What is the actual role of social media and social networking sites in political revolutions, uproars, and rebellions (like the recent Maghrebian revolutions, contemporary protests in Europe and the world, the Occupy movement, etc)?* How can an alternative Internet look like and what are the conditions for creating such an Internet? What are the opportunities and challenges posed by projects like Wikipedia, WikiLeaks, Diaspora, IndyMedia, Democracy Now! and other alternative media? What is a commons-based Internet and how can it be created?* What is the role of ethics, politics, and activism for Critical Internet Studies?* What is the role of critical theories in studying the information society, social media, and the Internet?* What is a critical methodology in Critical Internet Studies? Which research methods are needed on how need existing research methods be adapted for studying the Internet and society in a critical way?* What are ethical problems, opportunities, and challenges of social media? How are they framed by the complex contradictions of contemporary capitalism?* Who and what and where are we in 21st century capitalist information society? How have different identities changed in the global world, what conflicts relate to it, and what is the role of class and class identity in informational capitalism?* What is democracy? What is the future of democracy in the global information society? And what is or should democracy be today? What is the relation of democracy and social media? How do the public sphere and the colonization of the public sphere look like today? What is the role of social media in the public sphere and its colonization?SUBMISSIONa) For submission, please first register your profile on the ICTs and Society platform:http://www.icts-and-society.net/register/b) Please download the abstract submission form:http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/ASF.doc, insert your presentation title, contact data, and an abstract of 200-500 words. The abstract should clearly set out goals, questions, the way taken for answering the questions, main results, the importance of the topic for critically studying the information society and/or social media and for the conference.Please submit your abstract until February 29th, 2012, per e-mail to Marisol Sandoval: marisol.sandoval-wqGoIFByNPM< at >public.gmane.orgNotifications about acceptance or rejection of abstracts will be sent out within one week after the end of the deadline.

WikiLeaks mystery press conference Monday 12 noon, Frontline Club,Paddington, London, 13 Norfolk place W2 1QJ.WL press release: The Global Intelligence Fileshttp://wlcentral.org/node/2474On the 27th of February 2012, Wikileaks released the following statement:LONDON­ Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing TheGlobal Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from theTexas-headquartered &quot;global intelligence&quot; company Stratfor. Theemails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They revealthe inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher,but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations,such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman,Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of HomelandSecurity, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. Theemails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure,payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example:"You have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexualor psychological control... This is intended to start our conversation onyour next phase&quot; – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst RevaBhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligenceinformant providing information on the medical condition of the Presidentof Venezuala, Hugo Chavez."The material contains privileged information about the US government’sattacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attemptsto subvert WikiLeaks. There are more than 4,000 emails mentioningWikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving doorthat operates in private intelligence companies in the United States.Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratforadvance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money.The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a globalnetwork of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paidcredit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, whichincludes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around theworld.The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how theytarget individuals for their corporate and government clients. Forexample, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopalactivists, including the &quot;Yes Men&quot;, for the US chemical giantDow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/UnionCarbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands ofdeaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lastingenvironmental damage.Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to getinformation from insiders is risky. In August 2011, Stratfor CEO GeorgeFriedman confidentially told his employees: "We are retaining a lawfirm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt PracticesAct. I don’t plan to do the perp walk and I don’t want anyone here doingit either."Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into amoney-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEOGeorge Friedman hatched an idea to &quot;utilise the intelligence&quot;it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captivestrategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in aconfidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS:&quot;What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence andanalysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularlygovernment bonds, currencies and the like&quot;. The emails show that in2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested &quot;substantially&quot; more than$4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, acomplex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa waserected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But,confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff: &quot;Do not think ofStratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral... It will beuseful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as anotheraspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor... we arealready working on mock portfolios and trades&quot;. StratCap is due tolaunch in 2012.The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with USgovernment agencies and employs former US government staff. It ispreparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps,and it trains US marines and &quot;other government intelligenceagencies&quot; in &quot;becoming government Stratfors&quot;. Stratfor’sVice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a specialagent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and wastheir Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division. Despite thegovernmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in completesecrecy with no political oversight or accountability. Stratfor claimsthat it operates &quot;without ideology, agenda or national bias&quot;,yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselvesclosely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad –including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh tosecretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, moveWikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying toget into what it called the leak-focused 'gravy train' thatsprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures:"Is it possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravytrain? This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing. And we havesomething to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focuson counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know betterthan anyone on the planet... Could we develop some ideas and procedureson the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventingone’s own employees from leaking sensitive information... In fact, I’mnot so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution."Like WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables, much of the significance of the emailswill be revealed over the coming weeks, as our coalition and the publicsearch through them and discover connections. Readers will find thatwhereas large numbers of Stratfor’s subscribers and clients work in theUS military and intelligence agencies, Stratfor gave a complimentarymembership to the controversial Pakistan general Hamid Gul, former headof Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, who, according to US diplomaticcables, planned an IED attack on international forces in Afghanistan in2006. Readers will discover Stratfor’s internal email classificationsystem that codes correspondence according to categories such as ’alpha’,’tactical’ and ’secure’. The correspondence also contains code names forpeople of particular interest such as ’Izzies’ (members of Hezbollah), or’Adogg’ (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations andjournalists – from Reuters to the Kiev Post. The list of Stratfor’s'Confederation Partners' whom Stratfor internally referred toas its 'Confed Fuck House' are included in the release. Whileit is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by othermedia organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligenceorganisation that services governments and private clients theserelationships are corrupt or corrupting.WikiLeaks has also obtained Stratfor’s list of informants and, in manycases, records of its payoffs, including $1,200 a month paid to theinformant 'Geronimo', handled by Stratfor’s Former StateDepartment agent Fred Burton.WikiLeaks has built an investigative partnership with more than 25 mediaorganisations and activists to inform the public about this huge body ofdocuments. The organisations were provided access to a sophisticatedinvestigative database developed by WikiLeaks and together with WikiLeaksare conducting journalistic evaluations of these emails. Importantrevelations discovered using this system will appear in the media in thecoming weeks, together with the gradual release of the source documentsAlso named are the main press partners working on this release:- Al Akhbar – Lebanon – http://english.al-akhbar.com- Al Masry Al Youm – Egypt – http://www.almasry-alyoum.com- Bivol – Bulgaria – http://bivol.bg- CIPER – Chile – http://ciperchile.cl- Dawn Media – Pakistan – http://www.dawn.com- L’Espresso – Italy – http://espresso.repubblica.it- La Repubblica – Italy – http://www.repubblica.it- La Jornada – Mexico – www.jornada.unam.mx/- La Nacion – Costa Rica – http://www.nacion.com- Malaysia Today – Malaysia – www.malaysia-today.net- McClatchy – United States – http://www.mcclatchy.com- Nawaat – Tunisia – http://nawaat.org- NDR/ARD – Germany – http://www.ndr.de- Owni – France – http://owni.fr- Pagina 12 – Argentina – www.pagina12.com.ar- Plaza Publica – Guatemala – http://plazapublica.com.gt- Publico.es – Spain – www.publico.es- Rolling Stone – United States – http://www.rollingstone.com- Russia Reporter – Russia – http://rusrep.ru- Ta Nea – Greece –- http://www.tanea.gr- Taraf – Turkey – http://www.taraf.com.tr- The Hindu – India – www.thehindu.com- The Yes Men – Bhopal Activists – Global http://theyesmen.org- Nicky Hager for NZ Herald – New Zealand – http://www.nzherald.co.nzA press conference is going to take place at noon at the Frontline Clubin central London.The first press coverage to be announced appeared on Publico.es.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html]An Op-Ed in today's NY Times Sunday Review is entitled "TrueInnovation" and praises the work of Bell Labs. Something totallymissing from the 4 page article is ANY acknowledgement of the manyfederal grants that enabled that "innovation": satellite tech, lasers,transistors, etc. Bell Labs existed on money from the military and weare reaping that whirlwind as the country staggers towards yet anotherwar to keep alive the businesses that this innovation promoted, evenas we chat and post on the crumbs of the unintended benefits. (For adiscussion of Federal money involved in satellite research check outthe courageous work of The Network Project, a 60's research group atColumbia University. Their satellite report challenges the legality ofthe Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) granting of satellitelicenses to ANY private corporations since virtually all of thedevelopment was publicly funded. )

after watching the so called leadership struggle here in australia over thelast week i needed to purge myself of it on paper:http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2012/02/27/where-governments-reign-but-dont-govern-the-demise-of-zombie-politics/i was drawn to the zombie reference by a recent article on polanyi:Double movements and pendular forces: Polanyian perspectives on theneoliberal age 20 Current Sociology 60(1)http://csi.sagepub.com/content/60/1/3.abstractAs Peck et al. (2010) have argued, as an intellectual project,neoliberalism is practically dead, even while it blunders on as a mode ofcrisis-driven governance. In this scenario, it is entering apost-programmatic, ?living dead? or ?zombie? phase, ?in which residualneoliberal impulses are sustained not by intellectual and moral leadership,or even by hegemonic force? ? as in the 1980s and 1990s, during theneoliberal ascendancy ? ?but by underlying macroeconomic andmacroinstitutional conditions?, including enforced public austerity andglobal indebtedness, ?and growth-chasing, beggar-thy-neighbor modes ofgovernance? (Peck et al., 2010: 94).Peck et al. are not alone in identifying the zombie as a metaphorappropriate to the socioeconomic present. Mark Fisher (2009: 15, 78) drewattention to the zombifying logic of neoliberalism, Colin Crouch (2011)described neoliberalism as undergoing ?Non-Death? and Time magazine hailedthe zombie as representative of ?some real American values? and anointed itas ?the official monster of the recession? (Grossman, 2009).10 Gillian Tett(2009) had earlier recruited the metaphor to a more specific purpose, indesignating the phalanx of businesses and private equity firms that are?too weak to flourish but too complex and costly for their lenders to shutdown?, such that they remain ?half-alive, poisoning the corporate world bysilently spreading a sense of stagnation and fear?. John Quiggin (2010) andSOAS economist Ben Fine (2010) adapted the metaphor ? as ?Zombieconomics? ?to refer to mainstream economics in the neoliberal age: an approach that isdead in that its methodology has been comprehensively debunked, but undeadin that it persistently returns. (It blunders around ?looking forapplications out of the incidence of market imperfections, whether in thedimly incorporated real world, or through appropriation and degradation ofthe material of other social sciences? [Fine, 2010: 167].)Adding to the gathering crush of zombie metaphors, finally, are ChrisHarman?s Zombie Capitalism (2009) and David McNally?s Monsters of theMarket: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011), for whom thezombie, together with the vampire, symbolize capital. Capital, writesHarman (2009: 84), ?is labour that is transformed into a monstrous productwhose only aim is to expand itself?. It is ?dead labour?, in Marx?s phrase(in Harman, 2009: 84), ?that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking livinglabour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks?. In this use of thevampire metaphor Marx is making three interrelated claims: the argument forexploitation (that capital feeds off living labour), the idea ofinvisibility (like vampires, capital?s bloodsucking is shrouded indarkness) and the notion of alienation ? the dead dominate the living(McNally, 2011: 140). Equally, capital can be likened to zombies. Althoughzombies in literary and cinematic culture of the first decades of the 20thcentury figured specifically as mindless labourers (or Caribbean slaves)and in the second half as mindless and flesh-eating consumers, analogieswith the capital?labour relation in its totality should not be overlooked,argues McNally (2011: 141):In awakening past labour, living labour raises it from the dead, makes itundead. Indeed, only the vital activity of labour keeps capital fromlapsing into a death state: ?Living labour must seize on these things,awaken them from the dead?. In so doing, living labour also alienates anddeadens itself. ?All the powers of labour project themselves as powers ofcapital?, thus rendering workers appendages of the animated monster. In aperverse dialectical inversion, the very powers of labour that re-animatethe dead also deaden the living, reifying them, reducing them to azombie-state. Having escaped human control, capital?s goals are determined? like zombies ? by impersonal forces and not by conscious human volition.Harman?s use of the zombie analogy is akin to McNally?s, although hiscreatures more closely resemble one species of the zombie tribe: thedenizens of Romero?s films. Like Romero?s zombies, global capitalism, forHarman (2009), is not only parasitic upon living human labour and dead tothe needs of living human beings but is prone to erupt in savage bouts ofactivity that inflict chaos all around. The threat it poses is apocalyptic,a catastrophic collapse of social organization ?in Harman?s allegory,through runaway climate change.--

The Tedious Tax Payers' LamentCan we please stop crying about "Our Tax Payers' Money?"Far too often when reading a perhaps otherwise interesting essay, this horrible argument is made. Whatever the governments' wrong doing e.g: police violence against protesters, or military adventures abroad, along comes the lament of how can they do this with our tax dollars? Whether it's the activities of corrupt politicians, or some other case of perceived misuse money by the government, too often included is the tax payers' lament. This is a really bad argument.First of all, the argument is very flimsy politically. For instance, would it be OK for the police to beat-up protesters if such activity was not publicly funded? Would it be OK to bomb foreign countries if it did not cost the "tax payer" anything? Probably not. For this reason alone, lamenting that dubious actions by the State that were undertaken "With Our Tax Dollars" is the wrong argument. Instead, it's much better to argue against such activities by showing that they are wrong, harmful and contrary to the public good, regardless of how such undertakings were financed.Further, the tax payers' lament is actually false. The Government does not spend tax payers' money. The government does not collect taxes because it needs this money to spend. All money, meaning here the national currency of the country, originally comes from the government. If the government did not spend or lend, there would be no such money in the economy. The government creates money.What's more is that workers do not really pay taxes in any economic sense.When labour is sold as a commodity on the market its price is driven by its replacement costs. This is clear to most people when it comes to other commodities. For instance if the government enacted a tax on tomatoes, nobody would be surprised that the price of tomatoes went up. In most countries, the price of commodities like alcohol and tobacco is substantially made up of taxes, yet nobody expects that the sellers of these goods absorb the cost of such taxes in reduced profits, everybody knows they are passed-on in the prices paid.The same is true for wages. Wages are nothing more than the price of labour on the market, and in a capitalist market economy, they are likewise driven towards their replacement costs. In other words, if your taxes were lowered, then your real wages would likewise fall, either by the labour market driving wages down, or by the availability of extra money in the hands of workers driving prices up. Everything else being equal, the inflation-adjusted wage would remain the same. Therefore, the workers do not really pay taxes in any meaningful sense, rather those taxes are passed-on to the their bosses as part of the price of labour.Now, going back to the example of the workers taxes being reduced and yet wages remaining stable, in the case that for instance there were legal or structural barriers to wages being accordingly reduced by the labour market. I have noted above that the extra money available would drive up the prices of the things workers pay for. This is the real reason that the government requires taxes. Not to fund it's own spending, but to control prices.However this is not just a simple function of the amount of money the government creates, how money is spent is far more relevant than how much the government spends. More money only means higher prices when there is little or no excess capacity in the production of that which is purchased. In other words, only when the amount produced and sold does not or cannot increase in proportion with the increase in the supply of money.Money spent on consumer goods is likely to drive the prices of those goods up. This is almost always the case with workers' spending, since workers do not generally finance productive capacity directly, but compete against each other to purchase available goods.Money spent on investments in production is less likely to drive prices up. Government spending can mobilize underutilized economic capacity, especially unemployed labour, and increase the productivity of labour by way of eduction and other public investments, thus at the same time creating more money, but also more goods to spend money on. Therefore, not increasing prices, but increasing the size of the economy.There are no fixed limits on how much money the government can create. The governments and its central bank's ability to lend or spend is limited only by law and policy. Therefore, all lending and spending is undertaken in order to achieve some public aim. Spending and lending is a social choice, a choice of what aims to undertake and what aims not to undertake. We are not limited by any scarcity of tax dollars as to how many protestors we want to beat-up or how many countries we want to bomb, or for that matter, how many students we want educate or how many people we want to provide with medical care, we can only be limited by law and policy, and ultimately, by the productive capacity of our society. In other we are limited only by social choices as to how to employ our productive capacity.We have a right to say we do not approve of bad choices because we have a right to participate in the social choices made by our society, not because it is "our" tax money. The idea that our right to comment or dissent comes from the fact that we have paid taxes is a fundamentally undemocratic argument. Do people that pay more taxes have more right to say what social choices we make? No! We have a democratic right to dissent and that does not come from the amount of taxes we may have paid.So please, pretty please, drop the tax payers' lament. The government doesn't really spend tax dollars, workers don't really pay taxes, and most importantly, our right to criticize the government does not derive from how much tax we've paid, but from our democratic right to participate in social choices and to hold our government accountable to the public good.I'll be at Stammtisch tonight around 9pm as usual, please come! http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

Putin’s Imaginative Plot: from tyrant to martyrFebruary 28, 2012 by Tjebbe van TijenThe illustrated version with web links can be found at:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/putins-imaginative-plot-from-tyrant-to-martyr/----------------------------‎”PUTIN ASSASSINATION PLOT DENOUNCED AS RUSSIAN ELECTION SPECTACLE’” The Guardian 27th February 2012. (1)There are multiple meanings to this news, but they all end up with the same conclusion in favour of strong man Putin running once more for president: a win win situation.There is first of all a historical analogy and reference…. which fits in with Putin’s role of the new Czar.An attempt at the life of Putin to take place – as news sources say – in Moscow the day after his election, on his usual ride to work through the capital. Supposedly a bomb attack, which in the Russian mind traces back to the assassination of Russian Czar Alexandre II in 18881, March the first, by conspirators of the ‘Narodniki’ followers of the Narodnaya Volya (Peoples’s Will) movement. An act to show to the poor and subjugated majority class of the peasants that the Czar was not an omnipotent supernatural being, that his life could be taken and their position of powerless could be changed.If the plot against Putin was real, the Chechen conspirators would have revenged the suppression of their revolt against the Moscow reign of Chechen people. An answer to the Second Chechen War, a merciless clamp down strongly supported by Vladimir Putin. An act of tyrannicide by the Chechens as a symbol, a start to liberate themselves from Putin’s yoke. For many Russians such an act of revenge would prove the need of a strong figure like Putin to protect their homeland from the rebellion of insurgent regions, religions and nationalities. Putin as the man to stand up against those threatening the unity of what is left over of the great Russian empire. Something constantly expressed in the core message of Putin’s rhetoric: the protection of the Russian fatherland.[tableau of the face of Putin with a greek sculpture of two tyrant killers merged and the text "использовать свое воображение (use your imagination"]If the plot was – completely or even half – staged (by provocative methods), Putin’s secret service entourage would have used Putin’s widely expressed negative appraisal to create an event that can be imagined to be true. The proposed story line of a newly elected president killed straight after the day he has been elected fires the imagination and changes – even if it did not actually happen – his position. We know, that when it would have had happened in real, all forging of election results would be overshadowed by such a drama and soon be forgotten. Putin’s role would have changed from ‘a tyrant’ into ‘a martyr for democracy’. Real or fake, it hardly matters. Putin’s Plot has enough verisimilitude to fire people’s imagination and he will profit from that.[same tableau negative version; of the face of Putin with a greek sculpture of two tyrant killers merged and the text "использовать свое воображение (use your imagination"]Tyrannicide is the assassination of a tyrant for the common good. A tyrant in classical Greek history was someone who had taken power in a ‘polis’ by illegal or unconvential means. In the year 514 Aristogeiton (the bearded one) and Harmodius assassinated one of the two sons of the tyrant of Athens, Peisistratus. Their deed is said to have helped the establishment of Athenian democracy. A bronze statue has been made of the two ‘tyrannicides’ by Antenor and placed to their honour in the Agora, the public meeting space close to the town’s assembly. We all do know that ‘Athenian democracy’ was something meant only for the local male population, excluding women and Athenian residents originating from other poli and not to forget: slaves. ———–(1) A choice of three news source renderings of the alleged plot agains PutinTHE GUARDIAN, Miriam Elder in Moscow, February 27., 2012: “This is part of a clear election campaign,” said Yevgeniya Chirikova, a leader of the protest movement that has brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets of Moscow calling on Putin to quit. “It’s to bring attention to Vladimir Putin, and to develop this idea that there’s a threat everywhere. It’s a spectacle.” Putin’s press secretary described such statements as “blasphemous”. (…) State-run Channel One television reported that two men arrested by Russian and Ukrainian special forces in the Ukrainian port of Odessa earlier this year had been dispatched to kill Putin by Chechen rebel Doku Umarov, the leader of Russia’s separatist Islamist movement. (…) Channel One said it received information about the assassination attempt 10 days ago but did not explain why it did not release the news sooner. (…) Putin’s critics allege that a series of apartment block bombings on the eve of his first election in 2000 were orchestrated by the Kremlin to boost the then unknown politician’s popularity, rather than by Chechen rebels, as claimed. A similar assassination attempt on Putin was allegedly foiled on the day of Russia’s last presidential election in March 2008.”CBS ATLANTA, Vladimir Isachenkov Associated Press, February 27. 2012: “The Ukrainian Security Service said earlier this month it had detained a man sought by Russian authorities on charges of terrorism and two of his accomplices in Odessa on Feb. 4, but said nothing at the time about linked them to an anti-Putin plot. (…) Channel One said the source for its information was Russia’s Federal Security Service, the main KGB successor agency dealing with domestic security. The agency refused to comment. (…) A Chechen rebel website, KavkazCenter, shrugged off the report about the assassination plot as “election propaganda nonsense.” The website noted that the explosion in Odessa was initially reported to be a gas leak and the men were said to be preparing explosives for a contract hit on a local businessman. (…) The nationalist party leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said the assassination plot was invented by political spin doctors and designed to appeal to “poorly educated old ladies” and housewives, the news agency reported.”KAVKAZ CENTER web site (a channel used regularly by Chechen opposition), February 27., 2012: Putin said that the victory over the Chechen rebels is one of the major achievements of his reign. Putin has counted the victory over Chechen rebels as one of the key achievements of his rule, and the report about the alleged plot is likely to further boost support “, АР reports from Moscow. An influential French daily, Le Monde, writes: “For Frederick Longuet-Marx, chairman of the conference at Caen University, an expert on Islam and national identity in the Caucasus, “it was clearly a pre-election manipulation”. “Vladimir Putin just want to inflate a bit his pre-election rating and play on the fear of the Chechens. Indeed, during his 12 years of rule in Russia, Vladimir Putin has created an image of a strongman over his fierce struggle with Chechen terrorists. “Thanks to the assassinations of 1999, which were clearly the work of Russian secret services, the public opinion was prepared to resume the war against Chechnya”, recalled Frederick Longuet-Marx. Today, the prime minister is opposed by the growing mass of people, and he is forced to use once again the bogey of Chechen terrorism, which helped him so well in the past. However, other people seem to doubt. () “Osmayev is completely unknown in the ranks of the Chechen movement, and the name” Pyaznin” sounds absolutely non-Kazakh”, explains Frederick Longuet-Marx. He has also doubts about the very existence of the alleged terrorist organization. () “For an Islamic terrorist, it makes no sense to take refuge in Ukraine. The laws there are the same as in Russia”. () Another major French newspaper Le Figaro quotes an independent Moscow sociologist Dmitry Oreshkin on KGB anti-putinist radio Ekho Moskvy: () “This is a sign that people from the FSB are trying to use the tools to mobilize public opinion in an old way: “We are surrounded by the enemies. There is only one strong, intelligent and courageous leader, whom they are trying to eliminate”.Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

Folks,I came across a book that some of you may find interesting:Warfare in Independent Africa (New Approaches to African History)By William Reno, Associate Professor of Political Science atNorthwestern UniversityPub: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 294p"This book surveys the history of armed conflict in Africa in theperiod since decolonization and independence. The number ofpost-independence conflicts in Africa has been considerable, and thisbook introduces readers to a comprehensive analysis of their causesand character. Tracing the evolution of warfare from anti-colonial andanti-apartheid campaigns to complex conflicts in which factionalizedarmies, militias, and rebel groups fight with each other and prey onnon-combatants, it allows the readers a new perspective to understandviolence on the continent. The book is written to appeal not only tostudents of history and African politics, but also to experts in thepolicy community, the military, and humanitarian agencies."You can read a review of the book at:Africa’s Dirty Wars by Jeffrey Gettleman, March 8, 2012http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/africas-dirty-wars/You can download the book at:http://filepost.com/files/1b6522em/Warfare_in_Independent_Africa.pdf/[low speed]RegardsS. (Sam) Kritikos(this was posted originally in the Sci4D llist)# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

http://fuchs.uti.at/789/Google’s “New“ Terms of Use and Privacy Policy: Old Exploitation and Commodification in a New Ideological SkinOn March 1st, 2012, Google changed its terms of use and privacy policy. What has changed? Has something changed?Google’s general terms of services that were valid from April 16, 2007, until the end of February 2012, applied to all of its services. It thereby enabled the economic surveillance of a diverse multitude of user data that was collected from various services and user activities for the purpose of targeted advertising: “Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information”.Google specified in its old privacy policy (valid from October 20, 2011, until the end of February 2012) that the company “may collect the following types of information”: personal registration information, cookies that store “user preferences”, log information (requests, interactions with a service, IP address, browser type, browser language, date and time of requests, cookies that uniquely identify a user), user communications, location data, unique application number. Google said that it was using Cookies for “improving search results and ad selection”, which is only a euphemism for saying that Google sells user data for advertising purposes. “Google also uses cookies in its advertising services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web and on Google services”. To “serve and manage ads” means to exploit user data for economic purposes. The Google ad preferences manager displays the user interests and preferences that are collected by the use of cookies and used for targeted advertising.Google’s old privacy policy specified that “Google uses the DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web”. Google used DoubleClick, a commercial advertising server owned by Google since 2007 that collects and networks data about usage behaviour on various websites, sells this data, and helps providing targeted advertising – for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other web platforms. There was only an opt-out option from this form of networked economic surveillance. Google’s privacy policy provided a link to this option. Opt-out options are always rather unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and are therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Many Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because such mechanisms can drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising. That Google helped advertisers to “serve and manage ads across the web” means that it used the DoubleClick server for collecting user behaviour data from all over the WWW and using this data for targeted advertising. Google’s exploitation of users is not only limited to its own sites, its surveillance process is networked, spreads and tries to reach all over the WWW.The analysis shows that Google makes use of privacy policies and terms of service that enable the large-scale economic surveillance of users for the purpose of capital accumulation. Advertising clients of Google that use Google AdWords are able to target ads for example by country, exact location of users and distance from a certain location, language users speak, the type of device used: (desktop/laptop computer, mobile device (specifiable)), the mobile phone operator used (specifiable), gender, or age group.On January 25, 2012, the EU released a proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation that defines a right of individuals not to be subject to profiling, which is understood as “automated processing intended to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to this natural person or to analyse or predict in particular the natural person’s performance at work, economic situation, location, health, personal preferences, reliability or behaviour“ (article 20, 1). Targeted advertising is such a form of profiling. According to (the planned) article 20, 2 (c), profiling is allowed if the data subject consents according to the conditions of article 7, which says that if the consent is given as part of a written declaration (as e.g. a web site’s terms of use or privacy policy), the “consent must be presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter“ (article 7, 2). The regulation furthermore proposes a right of citizens to be forgotten (article 17), which also includes that third parties should be informed and asked to erase the same data (article 17, 2), the right to data portability (article 18), which e.g. means that all personal data must be exportable from Facebook to other social networking sites. A further suggested regulation is that by default only the minimum of data that is necessary for obtaining the purpose of processing is collected and stored (article 23). Fines of up to 1 000 000 Euros and 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of a company are implemented (article 79). The EU regulation to a certain extent limits targeted advertising by the right to be forgotten and the special form in which consensus must be given, it does however not make targeted advertising a pure opt-in option, which were a more efficient way for protecting consumers’ and users’ privacy.As a result of the announcement of the EU Data Protection Regulation, Google over night announced the change and unification of all its privacy policies and the change of its terms of use. In the new terms of use, the use of targeted advertising is no longer defined in the terms of use, but the privacy policy: “We use the information we collect from all of our services to provide, maintain, protect and improve them, to develop new ones, and to protect Google and our users. We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads”. Although Google presents its new policies as major privacy enhancement (“a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. […] we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy. Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies – and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html).The core of the regulations – the automatic use of targeted advertising – has not changed. The European Union does not require Google to base targeted ads on opt-in. Google offers two opt-out options for targeted ads: one can opt-out from the basing of targeted ads on a) search keywords and b) visited websites that have Google ads (Ads Preferences Manager, https://www.google.com/settings/ads/preferences/).In the new privacy policy, “user communications” are no longer mentioned separately as collected user information. But rather content is defined as part of log information: “Log information. When you use our services or view content provided by Google, we may automatically collect and store certain information in server logs. This may include: details of how you used our service, such as your search queries”. Search keywords can be interpreted as the content of a Google search. The formulation that log information is how one uses a service is vague. It can be interpreted to also include all type of Google content, such as the text of a gMail message or a Google+ posting.In the new privacy policy, Google says: “We may combine personal information from one service with information, including personal information, from other Google services – for example to make it easier to share things with people you know. We will not combine DoubleClick cookie information with personally identifiable information unless we have your opt-in consent”. This change is significant and reflects the circumstance of the EU data protection regulation’s third-party regulation in the right to be forgotten (article 17, 2). The question if DoubleClick is used for Google’s targeted ads more or less is based on the question how extensively and aggressively Google tries to make users to opt-in to DoubleClick. The effect is that Google will no longer be able to automatically use general Internet user data collected by DoubleClick. However, the unification of the privacy policies and the provision that information from all Google services and all Google ads on external sites can be combined allows Google to base targeted advertising on user profiles that contain a broad range of user data. The sources of user surveillance are now mainly Google services. As Google spreads its ad service all over the web, this surveillance is still networked and spread out. Google tries to compensate the limited use of DoubleClick data for targeted advertising with an integration of the data that it collects itself.Concerning the use of sensitive data, both the old and the new privacy policy specify: “We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information”. In addition, the new policy says: “When showing you tailored ads, we will not associate a cookie or anonymous identifier with sensitive categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation or health”. Targeted ads use data from all Google services, including content data”.The proposed EU Data Protection Regulation says that the processing of sensitive data (race, ethnicity, political opinions, religion, beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic data, health data, sex life, criminal convictions or related security measures) is forbidden, except if the data subject consents (article 9). Google continues to use content data (such as search queries) for targeting advertising that is based on algorithms that make an automatic classification of interests. By collecting a large number of search keywords by one individual, the likelihood that he or she can be personally identified increases. Search keywords are furthermore linked to IP addresses that make the computers of users identifiable. Algorithms can never perfectly analyze the semantics of data. Therefore use of sensitive data for targeted advertising cannot be avoided as long as search queries and other content are automatically analyzed. Google’s provision that it does not use sensitive data for targeted ads stands in contradiction with the fact that it says it uses “details of how you used our service, such as your search queries”.The overall changes introduced by Google’s new privacy policies and terms of use are modest, the fundamentals remains unchanged: Google uses targeted advertising as a default. DoubleClick is now less likely to be used for targeted advertising. Google has unified its privacy policies. Whereas Google presents this move as providing more transparency (“We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer”, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html), it also enables Google to base its targeted ads on a wide range of user data that stem from across all its services.Google claims that it does not use sensitive data for targeted ads, which is contradicted by the definition of content data as log data that can be used for targeted ads. Google’s old privacy terms (version from October 20, 2011) had 10 917 characters, which is an increase of 30%. The main privacy terms have thereby grown in complexity, although the number of privacy policies that apply to Google services was reduced from more than 70 to one.Google present its updated terms of use and privacy policies as new, although no fundamental improvements of user privacy protection can be found. The “change” is an ideological marketing strategy aimed at maintaining the stability of the exploitation of the labour of users that generates value and generates Google’s profits that in 2011 amounted to $8.5 billion (http://www.forbes.com/global2000/#p_1_s_arank_ComputerServices_All_All). Google continues to automatically collect, analyse and commodify a multitude of user data that is generated by searches and the use of Google services. The Marxist communication scholar Dallas Smythe wrote in 1981: “For the great majority of the population […] 24 hours a day is work time. […] [Audiences] work to market […] things to themselves”. For the great majority of Internet users, most of Internet use is (value-generating) labour time. Internet users work on Google and other corporate platforms to market things to themselves and are transformed into an Internet commodity that is sold to targeted advertising clients in order to accumulate capital in the amount of billions of Euros.In a response letter to the EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party (concerning Google’s updated policies and terms; see http://www.edri.org/book/export/html/1225), Google’s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer writes that “we are not selling our users’ data”. One wonders where Google’s $US 8.5 billion profits come from, except from the commodification of the data results of users’ activities?The EU Article 29 Data Protection Working Party asked the French National Commission for Computing and Civil Liberties (CNIL) to analyse Google’s new policies. In a letter to Google, CNIL shows deep concern and said that “our preliminary analysis shows that Google’s new policy does not meet the requirements of the European Directive on Data Protection […] Moreover, rather than promoting transparency, the terms of the new policy and the fact that Google claims publicly that it will combine data across services raises fears about Google’s actual practices. Our preliminary investigation shows that it is extremely difficult to know exactly which data is combined between which services for which purposes, even for trained privacy professionals. In addition, Google is using cookies (among other tools) for these combinations and in this regard, it is not clear how Google aims to comply with the principle of consent laid down in Article 5(3) of the revised ePrivacy Directive, when applicable. The CNIL and the EU data protection authorities are deeply concerned about the combination of personal data across services: they have strong doubts about the lawfulness and fairness of such processing, and about its compliance with European Data Protection legislation”. Big Brother Watch reports that only 12% of the Google users have read the new policy and that 65% are not aware that the changes have now come into effect. The initiative says: “Google is putting advertiser’s interests before user privacy and should not be rushing ahead before the public understand what the changes will mean”.According to the proposed new EU Data Protection Regulation (http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/120125_en.htm), Google’s exploitation of users is perfectly legal. That it is legal does however not mean that we cannot consider Google commodification as a violation of user/consumer/Internet workers’ privacy, but rather that the EU’s suggested legal provisions do not provide enough protection for users. The only way forward is to legally require all Internet companies (and companies in general) to necessarily make targeted advertising an opt-in option by law, which would give users and consumers more control. Implementing such a provision requires not only courage, it also requires not to be afraid of organised business interests. It is however the only way for putting privacy interests first. Today, profit stands over privacy protection and therefore over people. Google is one of the best examples for this circumstance. Google’s “new” privacy policy is not new at all and should consequently best be renamed to “privacy violation policy” or “user exploitation policy”.Related publication:Fuchs, Christian. 2011. A contribution to the critique of the political economy of Google. Fast Capitalism 8 (1). http://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/8_1/fuchs8_1.html# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

Folks: In preparation for some work on the impact of digital technology on "political-economy," I have been re-reading Mandeville, Smith, Maltham, RIccardo and others (including various commentators like Marx) to try to sort out what *assumptions* were made about humans in the "beginning" of this inquiry. As many know, the overwhelming issue they were dealing back then with was "passion" and, in various ways, how to relate an economy which was driven by passion with earlier notions of "morality." (Btw, the notion that human economic activity is somehow "rational" was not prominent among their assumptions and, from what I can tell, didn't actually take hold in economics until it was proposed by those like Herb Simon in the 1960s, who, arguably, were really promoting artificial intelligence and had to somehow fit computers without "desires" into their schema.) Perhaps most famously, Bernard de Mandeville's 1705 "The Grumbling Hive: or Knaves turn'd Honest" and his 1714 "The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefit" lays out an early version for what today we might call the "commodification of desire." The 300 year-long result of the changes chronicled by the early political-economists was global Industrialism (aka Capitalism?) and an apparently endless parade of large-scale production/consumption -- which, while certainly relying on a stream of technologies, was also fundamentally based on a "revolution" in "moral sentiments." Yes, it is important that this result has greatly increased the world's population, life-expectancy and overall living standards -- including in places that industrialized but would not typically be called "capitalist." What I'm wondering is if any contemporary "political-economists" have re-appraised the topic of desire and asked the question if one ever gets to the situation where "enough is enough"? Is there a "limit" to desire? If so, then what are the political-economic implications of changing that assumption about economic behavior? And, have any come to the conclusion that *yes* some have already passed that point in a meaningful way -- so that they are now living in a "post-desire" economy? The assumption most in the public sphere seem to make is that endless economic "growth" should be expected since the economy is endlessly driven by insatiable desires. Or, alternately, if economic growth isn't possible (even taking into account population growth), then we still need to satisfy those expanding desires some other way -- typically by "redistributing" what we already have. But is that a reasonable starting assumption -- specifically regarding endless growth in *desire* driving economic growth? Clearly, "pre-capitalist" society didn't work that way. Are the usual explanations (lack of technology, scarcity, etc.) -- particularly when presented by those who *assume* endless growth in desire -- credible? Indeed, why should "post-capitalist" society work that way? A related question: what happens to consumption (and growth) when an economy shifts from material goods to services (as some economies did when the term "post-industrial" was coined in the 1950s)? Moreover, what happens when an economy shifts to "information" (as some economies did when it became commonplace to refer to living in the "information age")? Do "people" ever have enough stuff? And, is that the same question as can "people" ever have enough love? Enough sex? Enough excitement? Enough attention? Enough information? Most importantly -- do assumptions about "human nature" originally made in the 17th/18th century still apply today? Mark StahlmanBrooklyn NY

http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/gmail-hell-day-4-dealing-with-the-borg-or-being-evil-without-really-thinking-about-it/Tiny URL: http://wp.me/pJQl5-8MI'm an email guy. I live (and live and maybe one day I'll die) with email.I use email to do the online class I'm teaching at a major Canadianuniversity, I use email to manage the online Journal of CommunityInformatics that I edit, I use email to host the bunch of CommunityInformatics email lists that I supervise, I use email to participate in athe bunch of email lists that I use to keep informed and help me to interactwith those areas of civil society (Governance, Human Rights, ICT4Development) that I am active in, I use email (and of course skype) tocommunicate with my family and friends, I use email as the primary means formarketing and management the rental unit that myself and my wife own andoverall I use email and my email address as my primary means ofcommunication with and from the outside world.Since about 2006 my primary email address and thus interface with thee-world has been gurstein-Re5JQEeQqe9fmgfxC/sS/w< at >public.gmane.org Nice, clean, functional (my kids areenvious and I've had semi-serious discussions about to whom among the halfdozen or so people in the world with the same last name (in that spelling itis quite rare) I'll ultimately bequeath it to.My email pattern is to use my gmail account as the reception point and thenPOP my mail off into an Outlook 2003 client that I've dragged along with methrough 3 or 4 computers over the last 5 years. This process has worked forme reasonably well over the last years and I'm comfortable with it and thecouple of thousand folks in my email directory are also comfortable with thename and how I'm communicating with them.Anyway, earlier this month I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh working on an ICT andDevelopment project. About midway through my stay in Dhaka one night duringmy regular jet-lagged 2 am email fest my Internet suddenly stopped working.I checked around and it seemed that the problem was with the hotel'swireless provider. When the Internet came back on there seemed to be somecontinuing problem with the POP connection with my Outlook. I was gettingmail coming in on my gmail account but it wasn't POPing properly to myOutlook account.(I'm not a technical whiz. so I started fiddling with my Outlook andsomehow, I can't really remember how, I ended up installing a new (but thesame) account on my Outlook and the email started rolling in as usual intomy Outlook-POPing off of gmail. (for those with little or no technicalinterest, bear with me a bit, there is a Community Informatics, and a policypoint at the end of this that I think is worth thinking about.To my dismay however, what was entering into my Outlook wasn't the usualstream of email rather it was long forgotten (and ultimately by-passed)email from 2006. It turns out that when you create a "new" Outlook accountas I had just done when you POP your mail off of gmail it doesn't start atthe end of your inbox, rather it starts at the beginning!Now remember, I'm an email guy and I've been using my gmail account forstoring mail that I would "POP" and then work with in Outlook. Of course,gmail has a maximum free storage of something like 7 gigs or so but my gmailfile exceeded that 2 or 3 years ago and I've been paying Google a modestamount ever since for extra storage space. My current gmail file is ataround 12 gigs and 120,000 emails-yes a lot, and yes, I should have beensystematically going through this mail and sorting, discarding etc.etc. butI didn't and I was willing to pay Google to not have to do this.Realizing that downloading 12 gigs of mail (120,000 emails) in 3-500 emailbursts (all that Outlook (or gmail) seemed to allow) was going to be a longand tedious exercise I turned to gmail "help" to see if there was some otherway around this (I had had something similar happen to me 3 years ago whileI was in South Africa and at the time there was nothing for it but todownload all the mail (at $30 or so a gig) in order to begin again at theend :)So I turned to what Google laughably identifies as its "help" function."Settings" -> "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" etc.etc. and after an astonishingnumber of steps I'm taken to this gmail Help Forum where I am told thatthere are (among other things)38137 discussions . Ask a "how to" questionUse this category if you want to know how to do something.and33348 discussions . Computer email program (please specify: Apple Mail,Outlook, Thunderbird, etc)Email programs are also known as POP or IMAP email clients.Clearly gmail is popular and other people also seem to have problems.So I go into this "help" function and I am literally placed in the middle ofan ocean of information and techie geeks without a paddle or a usableglossary.I have no idea what search terms to use for my particular problem and theones that I am able to figure out seem to take me to one or two year oldcomments from people like me with similar issues who were complaining abouthaving to download their entire gmail inboxes as I was ending up doing.I formulate and post a couple of queries to the forum trying to indicatewhat my problem is but no replies.So, I set about downloading my 120,000 emails at 3-500 emails a chunk (thatis a very large number of chunks and takes a considerable length of timesince Outlook has its own set of issues including a maximum size for itsmail files.Four days later I am getting close to the end of the process when mycapacity to download from Gmail is suddenly closed off "temporarily" becauseof "unusual activity" but according to the page that turns up when I try toaccess the account it will be turned back on fairly soon (they say) and itwas.Of course, there is no direct communication-the "messages" from gmail/Googleare all in the form of standard web screens that appear when attempting toaccess gmail with no pointers anywhere except back to the gmail forums and aGoogle "help" search window which isn't very useful if you can't figure outthe appropriate search terms! (and I tried dozens.So, an hour or so later I get access to my gmail account again and resumewhere I left off with the downloading (I'm up to the end of 2010 by thistime and the present is beckoning in a most tantalizing fashion and anyway Istill have no idea of any alternative to what I've been doing over the lastnumber of days.One more day along and I'm getting into the home stretch (mid-June 2011)when this below appears when I try to access my gmail account.Sorry. account maintenance underway We are currently working on your account because an error occurred with yourmail storage. Your account data and messages are safe. However, you won't beable to log in until our team is finished.We can't predict exactly how longthis will take, but if you are still unable to access your account in 48hours, please contact us with your username at gmail-maintenance-hpIqsD4AKlfQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org. We apologize for the disruption.That was roughly 4 days ago.My first reaction was panic. what am I to do. Not only can I not download mymail but I can't even access it, nor can I access my mail file (and thus myentire 6 year mail archive!)I send off an email to "gmail-maintenance", feverishly scan Google forpoints of entry into the Google Borg-o-sphere for my problem, send an emailto the only person I know in Google who might be in a position to help, thenanother email to "gmail-maintenance" . and I wait. Nothing. I wait somemore. nothing.. I'm incommunicado in the e-world, the only world that I'vebeen really communicado in for the last dozen years or so!Everything comes to a halt, my class, the Journal, my elists, the 3 or 4projects I have on the go around the world. everything.Folks, if you haven't experienced this you have no idea the feeling ofhaving been broken off in your communications capacity with your world andas well the loss of your e-memory of everything and everyone that you havebeen in touch with since you bit the gmail apple!And folks attempting to communicate with you of course get this form emailMail Delivery Subsystem mailer-daemon-gM/Ye1E23mwN+BqQ9rBEUg< at >public.gmane.org 7:02 AM (22 hours ago) This is an automatically generated Delivery Status NotificationTHIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:gurstein-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgMessage will be retried for 13 more day(s)Technical details of temporary failure:Account temporarily disabled(I particularly liked the slightly ominous and potentiallyshameful-"explanation" ("Account temporarily disabled")-for this lack ofcommunicability. What could he possibly have been doing that has provokedthose nice people at Google to "disable his account"?Toward the end of Day 2, and after the 5 or so unanswered/unacknowledgedmessages to the kind folks at gmail-maintenance-hpIqsD4AKlfQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org I start to movefrom shock and awe to recovery and I set up a new account (gmail of course:( it's so easy and it's free after all. as a means to begin to re-establishcontact with the outside world.I'm now into Day 4 of "Account maintenance" mode i.e. I can't access mynormal gmail account or inbox (although last evening for a few very briefmoments my inbox was accessible but this disappeared behind the outercarapace of the Borg once again-which is where it stands at the moment.According to the Google search I just did some 720,341,564 people use gmailall over the world. This is a truly astonishing number and the access to theinformation about those people that Google obtains through the provision ofthe "free" gmail service has made Google one of the largest and mostprofitable and (at least in the tech and information world) most powerfulcompanies in the world.But with great wealth and great power comes (or at least should come) greatresponsibility and my little excursion into gmail hell indicates that notonly is Google operating in a thoroughly irresponsible fashion but with itschoice to offer a Borg-like interface with its users (and clients rememberthat I'm paying for the storage of my gmail file) it is crossing the linefrom neglect to actual "being evil".Probably many if not most of the roughly billion people currently usinggmail aren't as heavily invested in their account and e-address as I am butI would guess that a rather large are as or even more invested in a life anddeath way.Some of the ways in which gmail/Google is not accepting its responsibilityto its users/clients include.That gmail can "temporarily suspend" my account with no explanation orrecourse or even means of communicating back to them to provide thebackground to whatever my transgression has been,That the "help" function for gmail is nothing more than a huge untended,unedited flea market of bits and pieces of expertise, experience, knowledgecombined completely blind with inexperience, misdirection, and uselessinformation,That there is no accessible and responsive point of contact forcircumstances such as mine (and anecdotally I'm hearing that thesecircumstances are rather more common than not)-remember that I've now sent 7emails to gmail-maintenance-hpIqsD4AKlfQT0dZR+AlfA< at >public.gmane.org without one reply or evenacknowledgement!Given the impact of the above on my personal circumstances gmail/Google hasacted in an "evil" way towards me-not just irresponsible but actually evilin that I have had no recourse, no means of providing supplementalinformation, no way of pleading my case, no indication as to when myparticular excursion into gmail hell might end or what form that finalresolution might take. I'm in limbo-Kafka's Castle, the Borg, HAL-you namethe nightmare scenario of dealing with implacable, faceless, unrespondingauthority/power/privilege and that is what you have with gmail in my lifeand ultimately and potentially in the lives of any of the other billion orso gmail users.Why for example, gmail/Google hasn't spent the money to set up anOmbudsperson service with an email that someone actually reads and answersis something that would, if Google were as I mentioned selling milk ormining coal, be something that legislatures would be compelling them to do.Providing instructions and "help" information that are intelligible toordinary users would be the subject of regulation if they were sellingtoasters or refrigerators rather than an email service. Giving anexplanation about the "temporary suspension" of a vital service would berequired by law if it were concerning the flow of clean water or electricityrather than the (arguably) equally necessary flow of information andcommunications.If gmail was a service delivering milk, or providing electricity orsupporting financial transactions they would be regulated and the kind ofbehaviour I'm describing above would be subject to government intervention,legal sanctions, political inquiries. Because the world of the Internet isso new, so shiny, so global it is a free-for-all and global utilities suchas Google (which is what email/gmail is in practice and as it should beunderstood in law) can be as they are, with no recourse from individualusers who after all are scattered and isolated and without any of theresources that a Google can command.And notably the world has not yet managed to catch up so there are noframeworks available globally to deal with issues such as mine (or megalithssuch as Google). They will come in time but a lot of folks are going to feela lot of pain, and Borgs like Google are going to get away with doing (andbeing) a lot of evil in the meantime.Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.email: gurstein-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgweb: http://communityinformatics.netblog: http://gurstein.wordpress.comtwitter: #michaelgurstein

Sorry for cross-posting: ----------------------------------------------------------CfP: FLOSSIE 2012, 25/26 May at QMUL, East London, UK----------------------------------------------------------Flossie 2012 is a free, two-day event for women who work with, or areinterested in, Software Libre/FOSS in Open Data, Knowledge Digital Artsand Education. Flossie is an independent network of women practitioners that has itsroots in social change movements as well as arts, technology andacademia. Whether you code, tinker or want to explore alternatives to‘big-tech’ corporations, all women are welcome. The first day will mix micro-talks with birds of a feather sessionsabout the work we do. On the second day there will be more structuredworkshops and discussions for both experienced practitioners and womennew to FLOSS to make contact and skillshare. *Submissions*We invite proposals for talks, workshops and Birds of a Feather sessions* Deadline for proposals, Monday 12 March 2012 * Submit proposal here: http://www.flossie.org/openconf/ * The organising committee will send notifications regarding sessionproposals no later than 26 March 2012*Who is this event for?* • Women users and developers of FLOSS in digital arts, free culture,open data, open knowledge, social change movements and non-profits • Researchers, students and writers • Women entrepreneurs and social innovators using FLOSS *Themes:* • Sharing our current experiences and achievements • Building cross-disciplinary and cross-community networks • Improving visibility of women in FLOSS as well as technology ingeneral and reaching out to new women *Further Information*If you have any questions regarding this event please emailconf< at >flossie.org The conference will be on Friday 25 May and Saturday 26 May 2012 QueenMary, University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS The nearest tube stations are Stepney Green and Mile End *Call for participation*Register here: http://flossie2012.eventbrite.co.uk/ Submit proposal here: http://www.flossie.org/openconf/ Flossie 2012, 25/26 March for digital artists, educators, entrepreneursand nonprofits using FLOSS - CfP: is.gd/Bt77CZ# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

For years I have been dismayed by a very common refusal to think. The dismaying part is that it's based on the work of European history's greatest political philosopher, Karl Marx. It consists in the assertion that social media exploits you, that play is labor, and that Facebook is the new Ford Motor Co.Now, there are all kinds of things wrong with social media, and I don't even use it. But even I can recognize that it doesn't exploit you the way a boss does. It emphatically _does_ sell statistics about the ways you and your friends and correspondents make use of your human faculties and desires, to nasty corporations that do attempt to capture your attention, condition your behavior and separate you from your money. In that sense, it does try to control you and you do create value for it. Yet that is not all that happens. Because you too do something with it, something of your own. The dismaying thing in the theories of playbour, etc, is that they refuse to recognize that all of us, in addition to being exploited and controlled, are overflowing sources of potentially autonomous productive energy. The refusal to think about this - a refusal which mostly circulates on the left, unfortunately - leaves that autonomous potential unexplored and partially unrealized.Here, in an absolutely luminous text, Michel Bauwens shares liberating thoughts about what you might call a practical and present utopia.If you want to read it with the multiple links included, just go to this location on one of my favorite global idea-aggregators, Al Jazeera:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/20122277438762233.htmlBest to all, and thanks to Michel for a beautiful text. - BH***The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'?--Michel BauwensDoes Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the company's estimated value coming from?This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term "Free Labour" to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labour - firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such as Facebook. The argument can be summarised very succinctly by the catch phrase: "If it's free, then you are the product being sold."This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled "They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free". In this mini-essay, they make a very strong claim that "we can certainly position the users of Facebook as labourers. If labour is understood as 'value producing activity', then updating your status, liking a website, or 'friending' someone, creates Facebook's basic commodity."This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two types of value creation that were already recognised as distinct by 18th century political economists. The distinction is between use value and exchange value. For thousands of years, under conditions of non-capitalist production, the majority of the working population directly produced "use value" - either for themselves as subsistence farmers, or as tributes to the managerial class of the day. It is only under capitalism that a majority of the working population produces "exchange value" by selling their labour to firms. The difference between what we are paid and what the market pays for the products we are making is the "surplus value".But Facebook users are not workers producing commodities for a wage, and Facebook is not selling these commodities on a market to create surplus value.Indeed, Facebook users are not directly creating exchange value at all, but instead communicative use value. What Facebook does is to enable this pooling of sharing and collaboration around their platform - and by enabling, framing and "controlling" that activity, they create a pool of attention. It is this pool of attention which is sold to advertisers, for an estimated $3.2bn per year, which is barely $3.79 in ad revenue per user.We can, of course, argue that Facebook does a lot more than just selling the attention. For instance, their knowledge of our social behaviour, down to the individual level, has undoubted strategic value - for political power players and commercial firms alike. But is this surplus value really worth $100bn? That remains a speculative bet. For the moment, it's likely that the nearly one billion users of Facebook do not find the $3.79 in ad revenue per user very exploitative, especially since they do not pay to use Facebook, and are using the website voluntarily. That said, there is a price to pay for not using Facebook, in terms of relative social isolation from their peers who are users.Engineering scarcityWhat is important, however, is that Facebook is not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a much larger trend in our society: an exponential rise in the creation of use value by productive publics, or "produsers", as Axel Bruns calls them. It is important to understand that this creates a huge problem for a capitalist system, but also for workers as we have traditionally conceived them. Markets are defined as ways to allocate scarce resources, and capitalism is in fact not just a scarcity "allocation" system but also a scarcity engineering system, which can only accumulate capital by constantly reproducing and expanding conditions of scarcity.Where there is no tension between supply and demand, there can be no market and no capital accumulation. What peer producers are doing, for now mostly producing intangible entities such as knowledge, software and design, is to create an abundance of easily reproduced information and actionable knowledge.This cannot be directly translated into market value, because it is not at all scarce - it's over-abundant. And this activity, moreover, is done by knowledge workers, whose ranks are steadily expanding. This over-supply threatens to make knowledge workers' jobs precarious. Hence, an increased exodus of productive capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetisation, which only operates at its margins. In the past, whenever such an exodus occurred - of slaves in the decaying Roman Empire, or of serfs in the waning Middle Ages - that is precisely the time when conditions were set for major societal and economic changes.Indeed, without a core reliance on capital, commodities and labour, it is hard to imagine a continuation of the capitalist system.The problem is this: internet collaboration has enabled the creation of use value in a way that totally bypasses the normal functioning of our economic system. Normally, increases in productivity are somehow rewarded, and these rewards enable consumers to derive an income and buy products.But this is no longer happening. Facebook and Google users create commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly. And they are not at all rewarded for their own value creation. Since what they are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods, these value creators do not receive income. Social media platforms are exposing an important fault line in our economic system.We have to link this emerging social economy, based on sharing creative expression, with the more authentic field of commons-oriented peer production, as expressed in the open-source and "fair use" open-content economy, which one estimate said made up one-sixth of US GDP. There is also no doubt that one of the key ingredients of China's success so far has been the combination of the open-source - such as the country's domestic "Shanzai" economy - together with the patent-free policies that are imposed on foreign investors. This has guaranteed an open, innovative commons for much of Chinese industry.Even as the open-source economy becomes the default way to create software, and even as it creates companies that reach a revenue of more than $1bn, such as Red Hat, the overall effect is still deflationary. It has been estimated that open-source annually destroys $60bn in revenues for the proprietary sector.Thus, the open-source economy destroys more proprietary software value than it replaces. Even as it creates an explosion of use value, its monetary value decreases.Open-source manufacturingThe same effects occur when the shared innovation commons approach is used in physical production, where it combines an open-source approach with distributed machinery and capital allocation (using techniques such as crowd-funding and social lending platforms, like Kickstarter).For example, the Wikispeed SGT01, a car that received a five-star security rating and can attain a fuel efficiency of 100 miles per gallon (roughly 42.5 kilometres per litre), was developed by a team of volunteers in just three months. The car is being sold for only $29,000, about a quarter of what a traditional industrial automobile firm would charge, and for which it would have needed at least five years of development and billions of dollars.Local Motors, a rapidly growing crowd-sourced car company, claims to develop automobiles five times faster than Detroit, with 100 times less capital, but WikiSpeed has achieved even faster design and production times. The WikiSpeed car is designed for modularity, using sophisticated software development techniques (such as agile, scrum, and extreme programming), an open design, and local production by garages, using distributed manufacturing techniques.And Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform, works similarly to WikiSpeed and is driving prices down in its sector. If Marcin Jakubowsky's Open Source Ecology project is successful, this will happen for at least 40 different types of machinery. In every field where an open-source manufacturing alternative develops - and I predict that they will be developed in every single field - there will be similar pricing and income pressures on mainstream economic models.'Collaborative consumption'Another expression of the sharing economy is collaborative consumption. As Rachel Botsman and Lisa Gansky have demonstrated in their recent books - What's Mine is Yours and The Mesh, respectively - there is a rapidly growing sharing economy developing through product-service systems, sharing marketplaces and collaborative lifestyles.For example, it's estimated that there are about 460 million homes in the developed world, and that each home has, on average, $3,000 worth of unused items available. There is clearly economic benefit to be had by using these idle resources. Much of it will not be rented, however, but swapped and bartered for free. Even the paid sharing economy will have a depressive effect on the buying of new products.Such developments are good for the planet and good for humanity, but the larger question is: are they good for capitalism?What will happen with capitalism given social media-based exchanges, commons-based production of software and hardware, and collaborative consumption, on an increasingly massive scale?What happens if more and more of our time goes into producing use value - a fraction of which creates monetary value - but there is not a substantial return of income to the use value producers?The financial crisis beginning in 2008, far from diminishing the enthusiasm for sharing and peer production, is in fact accelerating the adoption of such practices. This is not just a problem for the increasingly precarious working class, but also for capitalism itself, which is seeing its opportunities for accumulation and expansion dry up.Not only is the world faced with a global resource crisis, it is also facing a crisis of intensive development, because value creators are increasingly income-less. The knowledge economy turns out to be a pipe dream, because what is abundant cannot sustain market dynamics.Thus we have an exponential rise in the creation of use value, but only a linear increase in the creation of monetary value. If workers have less and less income, who can buy the commodities that are offered for sale by companies? This, in a nutshell, is the crisis of value that we are facing as humanity. It is a challenge just as big as climate change or increases in social inequality.The meltdown of 2008 was a prefiguration of this crisis. Since the advent of neoliberalism, workers' wages have been stagnating and purchasing power was maintained only by an over-extension of credit throughout society. This was the first phase of the knowledge economy, in which only capital had access to networks, which it used to create globally coordinated multinationals.As the knowledge society grew in size, more and more of businesses' value consisted of intangible, not physical, assets. The neoliberal stock market and its speculative excesses can be seen as a way to evaluate the amount of intangible value that is added to the stock's value by human co-operation. This bubble had to burst.The second phase of the knowledge society, in which networks are diffused throughout society and allow productive publics to be directly engaged in peer production, creates an additional layer of problems. Add to the wage stagnation and the exodus out of wage labour that peer-based use value creation causes, and we can see that the problem is not solvable within the present paradigm. Is there a solution?There is - but that is for the next installment. The solution involves an adaptation of capitalism to peer production, but also opens up the avenues for a transcendence of capitalism.

Historical handshakes confirming Oil Ententes of the Elys?e with Libya and Syria 2007 ? 2009March 1, 2012 by Tjebbe van TijenThe full illustrated and documented version with web links can be found at:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/historical-handshakes-confirming-oil-ententes-of-the-elysee-with-libya-and-syria-2007-2009/--------[tableau with Sarkozy shaking hands with Gaddafi (2007) and Assad (2009) on the steps of the Elys?e][visual statistics on oil production and oil export of Libya and Syria, with the caption: The backdrop of the policy for Libya and Syria by European Union and associated NATO countries is always painted with oil. (1) British/Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, French Total, CNPC from China and ONGC of India are main investors in Syrian crude oil and gas. (2)13 November 2009 humanitarian oil diplomacy by Assad, the other way around: ?I asked President Sarkozy to interfere as to stop the daily killing of the Palestinians by the Israel Army,? said H.E. President Al-Assad citing today?s killing of a Palestinian citizen. (3) ][news photograph of Al-Assad delevring a speech at the Elys? in Paris in 2009, with this caption: His Excellency President Al-Assad described his talks with President Sarkozy as 'very successful'', 'constructive'' ''transparent'' and as ''bolstering the confidence built between Syria and France'', ''dealing with many international as well as regional issues, bilateral relations, the Iranian nuclear file, the recent positive developments in Lebanon, particularly following the formation of the Lebanese Government, which we expect to be an important step for the stability in Lebanon.'' (...) ''The talks, further, dealt with the situation in Gaza from a human perspective; I asked President Sarkozy to interfere as to stop the daily killing of the Palestinians by the Israel Army,'' said H.E. Pre sident Al-Assad citing today's killing of a Palestinian citizen.] ?? discovery of treasure, a huge oil and gas in the basin of the Mediterranean is estimated reserves to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 107 billion barrels of oil.?[map of oil concessions in Syria with this caption: SYRIAN OIL AND GAS NEWS: Announcement for International Offshore Bid Round 2011 Category: Oil Ministry Decisions & Declarations | Posted on: 30-03-2011 The Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources and General Petroleum Corporation (GPC) invite international petroleum companies for an International Bid Round to explore, develop and produce petroleum from three offshore blocks in some areas of the territorial waters and the exclusive economic zone of the Syrian Arab Republic in the Mediterranean Sea according to the production sharing contract.The announcment contains three marine areas ( block I, block II, blockIII) with covarage area estemated by 3000 cubic kilometers per one block. the annoncement date starts in 24/3/2011 for six mont hes and closed on 5/10/2011.The modern American studies recently confirmed the discovery of treasure, a huge oil and gas in the basin of the Mediterranean is estimated reserves to 122 trilli on cubic feet of natural gas and 107 billion barrels of oil. (4)]??(1) oilprice.com 14/4/2011: ?Oil Production Figures in Areas of Unrest (Middle East & North Africa)?(2) royaldutrchshellplc.com 3/12/2011: ?E.U. sanctions force Shell to leave Syria.?(3) www.presidentassad.net: Presidents Al-Assad/ Frnace visit statements (13/11/2009)(4) Syrian Oil and Gas News; 8/2/2010:International announcement for developing 7 oil field in ArraqahPosted in European politics, Africa, Middle East, news-tableau | Tagged Bashar al-Assad, human rights, Nicolas Sarkozy, Colonel Gaddafi (1942-2011), Oil Entente, State visit Al Assad to France 2009, State visit Colonel Gaddafi to France 2007, oil export Libya, oil export Syria

<http://pastebin.com/0xXV8k7k>Piotr CzerskiWe, the Web Kids.(translated by Marta Szreder)There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the mediadiscourse as 'generation'. I once tried to count the 'generations' that havebeen proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about theso-called 'Generation Nothing'; I believe there were as many as twelve. Theyall had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never providedus with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the commonexperience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations.We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change cameunnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internetaccess. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changedduring the past fifteen years.We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet,are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversiveway. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosisof the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited culturalcontext, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of freechoice.Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun 'we', as our 'we' isfluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary.When I say 'we', it means 'many of us' or 'some of us'. When I say 'we are', itmeans 'we often are'. I say 'we' only so as to be able to talk about us at all.1.We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes usdifferent; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your pointof view, difference: we do not 'surf' and the internet to us is not a 'place'or 'virtual space'. The Internet to us is not something external to reality buta part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with thephysical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet andalong it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we couldsay there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that hasshaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for testsonline, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love andbroke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn andwhich we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuouslyand continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us.Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built,they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web;we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, moreintense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information isto us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a postoffice in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something - the firstsymptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of 'Estonia', or whetherthe water bill is not suspiciously high - we take measures with the certaintyof a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find theinformation we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, weknow how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead ofone answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract themost likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. Weselect, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learnedinformation for a new, better one, when it comes along.To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to rememberunnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detaileddefinitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that isneeded to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need thedetails, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to beexperts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise inwhat we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will sharetheir expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief thatinformation exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefitfrom the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solvingeveryday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to doit, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, onthe ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.2.Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: globalculture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important fordefining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status,ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural eventswe pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them,we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give ussuggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films,series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from aroundthe world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of peoplethat perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that cultureis becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need freeaccess to it.This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available tous without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give itback for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibilityof technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reservedfor professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort andinvestment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributorsask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for thedistribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without anyloss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, wewant the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but thenwe expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, ahigher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for thefile to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want toreward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string ofnumbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchangethat is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporationsare of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their businesshas ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of acceptingthe challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get forfree they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remindus of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in theexternal memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchangingthem, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of'Casablanca' is to you. We find online the films that we watched as childrenand we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about theLittle Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuseyou of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either.3.We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our accountbalance allows for it; we know that starting a bank account or changing themobile network is just the question of filling in a single form online andsigning an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to the other sideof Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organisedin two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasinglyannoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takesseveral forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions.We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of onepermanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicatewith each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity tohave a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents,who were convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and whoconsidered interaction with the state as something to be celebrated. We do notfeel that respect, rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and themajestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible through theclouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is anetwork, not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue withanyone, be it a professor or a pop star, and we do not need any specialqualifications related to social status. The success of the interaction dependssolely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as important andworthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defendingour arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on manymatters are simply better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with thegovernment?We do not feel a religious respect for 'institutions of democracy' in theircurrent form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see'institutions of democracy' as a monument for and by themselves. We do not needmonuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a systemthat is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change ispossible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by anew one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving moreopportunities.What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access toinformation and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Webis what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that tonext generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware ofit, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that,perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in your journalism.___"My, dzieci sieci" by Piotr Czerski is licensed under a Creative CommonsUznanie autorstwa-Na tych samych warunkach 3.0 Unported License:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/Contact the author: piotr[at]czerski.art.pl

[The following ideas relate to observations and questions offered for contemplation by Newmedia. The viewpoint proposed contains imprecision, errors, inaccuracies, and other personal limitations, so apologies in advance for this; corrections and improvements in conveyance are welcome. That said, the conceptualization itself is not mine alone and instead compiles various small observations already existing within a given culture, recontextualizing them here in what may or may not be a peculiar framework. It is of concern that the ideas presented may be offensive to some as they involve sometimes explicit description of events related to sexuality, in its various facets, and money and the basis for exchange. To adequately delve into these realms it will be necessary to describe and correlate the overlapping dynamics and it can be disturbing to consider, at least for me, though it is also necessary to go further than abstractions will allow.] ---* introduction *I never understood money, never having that visceral relationor lust for it that other people seem to have, where it becomesa passion, and this may be why all the freedoms it can allowwere also never readily accessible either. It has always beensecondary if not tertiary, and never in abundance and often ofrelation to the cyclical peril of just getting by. Never out aheador in a safe zone financially. Thus it involves ongoing conflict,a type of chaotic system like the weather, hard to forecast yetknowing what the seasons are and how they will arrive again.Sometimes a comet hits and the weather gets worse & worse.A good way to learn about money is to not have enough andthen to learn about concepts of value that are tied into things,material stuff, that is a type of storage for monetary value. Thestuff can maintain its value, depreciate, or raise in value even.Craigslist is an example of this type of economy, where peoplesell things in exchange for money. A type of auctioning off of anobject of value to another who agrees it is of value and tradespaper currency for whatever the material object may be. So ifa person is struggling with limited income, one thing to do isto see if there is anything that can be sold to generate money,thus turning this stored value into more useful paper currencythat can be spent for other things. For example, someone cansell their record collection or CDs or books and regenerate aportion of what was initially invested. Else, a person may evenlook for undervalued items for the purpose of reselling them,to gain a profit via this shared value and process of exchange.In other words, some may make such exchanges for reasonsof financial necessity, as a way to generate emergency fundsvia liquidating assets (if this is the correct phrase) while othersmay focus on making money via this exchange as a business,where it could be not just about recouping money and insteadabout gaining money in the overall process. This could be thedifference between a more informal and a business approach.The benefits to getting rid of unnecessary stuff is to streamlinea life, to realize what is a priority, what is important, what canbe gotten rid of, and this purgative function then can releaseenergy that otherwise is contained or stored within the variousthings involved. For instance, disorganization and clutter caneffect how a person goes about their life, how they manage inthe day to day, and their coping strategies. To pare down lifeto the basic essentials, to get rid of the unnecessary is akin toa concept of economy in the sense of efficiency and thrift. Inthat what is inessential may create frictions or work against agiven set of goals or functioning, and releasing that constraintcould unleash a new set of possibilities for primary goals, etc.It helps a person become more in tune with their goals, whatthey are trying to do, what is most important, how to get there.So in the everyday there are concepts like these that exist inrelation to economics and decision-making. Small decisionssuch as throwing away or donating something that has beenunused or sitting on a shelf for years has its own significance,and this can have many effects in a larger overall context if aseries of such decisions are made, which give or provide newenergy to the motivations that are potentially involved / related.Such as the power to do something or to change functioning.Thus, seasonally as well, perhaps there is the death and lossof initiatives or stalled out opportunities or remnants of fork-in-the road judgments, and dealing with the detritus or ruins ofthese such inefficiencies in simply trying to live and functionare a part of life, a way of establishing ~lessons learned, elseto ignore them & just keep going ahead with that inefficiency.It would seem that this would be a realm where morality andself-reflection would be important with regard to being awareof how excess money can allow an unreflective and furtherpursuit of a given way of being or approach to consumption,really, whereas having less money may force more value-judgments and prioritization due to having limited resources,and this is not necessary a bad thing in many circumstances,because having-it-all may only be temporary and illusory.Another type of economic functioning seemingly relevant toquestions of currency and money involves a substitution orexchange for this currency, another format for making trades.The coupon, cherished by those just getting by, is a way thatthe inequalities in the economic system can be ever slightlyadjusted by corporations and businesses to help those whoare not benefiting from the existing and lopsided economicstructure to have just a little bit more wiggle room to get by.This could be viewed in terms of redistribution of income,possibly else a type of corporate charity or subsidy for thegeneral population in some ways. It is perhaps not in the10 cent discount that this occurs, though with the grocerystore running double-coupon days, it is possible to save20 dollars per visit using such coupons, which providesa helpful buffer for those who are struggling in this way.Thus, some may be thankful for corporations and retailbusinesses who provide such currency for their use, asthis can have a social, political, and economic impact onthe way a person lives and their ability to get things done.Likewise, there are those who deride those who use thecoupons, as if they are being cheapskates, and this oftenstruck me is an odd position to take, especially againstthe poor, such that such stigmatization makes practicingthis form of barter economy, it would seem, into somethingto be derided as if someone cheating the system. There isa distinct personality that is associated with these views,and often they can be found behind the cash registers, asif a person who is saving money is stealing money fromthe cashier and the business. So much so that retributioncan occur, such as 'bag your own groceries'. Just yesterdayI picked up a sale item and saved 4 dollars off a fresh juice,and needed 2 cents to get the coupon because it requireda minimum purchase and as I went to get a piece of garlicthe cashier twisted the safety cap, partially opening it, sothat when I got home it was as if the juice was tamperedwith. Weird, because in this way it devalues the juice andturns something that was of high value into something oflower or suspect value (poisoning?) via such subversion.Why would this happen in a context of equal exchange,or is there something more that is going on between theparties involved in the transactions -- are there differentgroups with different agendas involved in this exchangeprocess, and thus the money is a point of conflict if notof contention, regarding who has what, via this money.Meaning, is it a value judgment that someone may bemaking a political exchange when using money or ina monetary transaction and what might this be about?My sense is that there are certain people who valuemoney above all else as their overriding truth, and thatit defines for them the basis for morality, and this groupis its own community, has its own politics, and seems tosit above others in an oligarchic fashion, administratively.And that monetary exchanges are in a sense judgments.Decision-making boils down primarily to money as themain issue, and a view of its profit for the given group.Enough so that a crooked monetary system could beused to benefit such a private constituency while sayingthese same forces are serving the general public at large.And this condition has been engineered through banksand institutions and those representatives who populatethem, to enact certain strategies for this to be possible.IN other words this is to say that is presupposed thata certain group exists that is tied to the existing monetarysystem and has a vested interest in keeping it the way it isbecause it benefits them more than others, by default, andan associated greed and avarice can be found in relationto monetary issues where money is the number 1 priority,versus issues of humanity, of justice, of virtues, of ideas.* What is money? *Never having known what money actually was or is, itwas through this deliberative process of evaluating andexchanging things so as to allow further improvementsthat basic principles were learned about its functioning.This includes aspects of online commerce or local retailstores where 'new items' no longer seem made to performtheir basic function (a dilution due to copying the copies),and therefore the money that is asked for, to purchase agiven item [x] then is not actually performing the task that[x] is supposed to be capable of. In other words, the basiceconomic exchange would be to exchange money for [x],yet the trade actually involves trading [x] for not-[x] instead.This situation is of a regressive or transgressive economiccondition whereby 'value' of an item may only be superficialand not actual. It is the image of the item that is of value, theappearance and not the thing itself. For instance, orderinga household item that ceases to function correctly in use.And it often seems that this is by design, that it is intentional.That the economy is working against the individual consumer.How could that be? Yet, how could a home store like Targetsell its own brand of bedsheets that pill after two washes?Such questioning seems to lead to a manufacturing processand quality control, and the role of the division of labor inhaving middle managers throughout the process which canalter the course of events via any number of ways. This toowould seem to imply an exchange is involved between theseller and the production of the items sold, and is there ashared trust that is enabling a shared goal for this item orhas competition and competing politics/economics enteredinto this internal production, which the faulty products thenevidence, a type of symptom of the diseases of production?In a roundabout way, this is the same condition between abuyer and a seller of something, although inverted, withinan organization, and its internal relations, with itself and itsinteraction with (global) society, as geopolitical workforce.A worker in China committing suicide over work pressuresmight as well be a neighbor down the block in this context,even though they may occupy dark and hidden chamberstoiling as an automaton a world away, to make devices thatcan be purchased in a shiny local retail shop for money. Isthe deterioration of these devices then part of the feedbackloop about the structural problems in this process of trade,of exchange and work, that the dysfunctional production issignaling an unsustainable and fragile system exploitableand in this way the standard 'economy' can be devaluedvia these same minor mistakes, errors, inadequacies -and what can actually be done about it, on a small scale,except to enforce a given model, more and more like thatof a dictatorship, where people are to be robots, ideally,and not have any social or political or economic conflicts