First, if a radio station in your area airs Alternative Radio, you can hear a talk I gave on religion and politics. http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/JENR002.shtml
Last month I interviewed Chris Hedges onstage in Austin. A piece drawn from that conversation is online in the Austin American-Statesman. Thanks to Statesman reporter Brad Buchholz for doing a great job of putting the piece together.
http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/books/2009/12/06/1206hedgesweb.html
Author warns of pageantry's perils
Chris Hedges, who wrote 'Empire of Illusion,' examines America's identity crisis in an age of consumerism and spectacle.
By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Chris Hedges sees, in America, a nation that has lost its way. He sees a country that places prosperity above principle, celebrity above substance, spectacle above nuance and introspection. He sees a "timid, cowed, confused" populace disconnected from language, governed by consumerism, ambivalent toward the common good, enamored by an American myth that has no basis in the American reality.
"We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illlusion from reality," Hedges writes in his new book, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle." "We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level.
"Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys — a symbol, in Italian cutlure, of ignorance and stupidity."
Hedges paints a bleak picture in this book — all the more sobering when one considers that this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has spent decades covering violence and war around the globe, in Africa and the Balkans, South America and the Middle East. He states, plainly, that the age of American Imminence is over. Our standard of living is going to drop. Our consumptive tendencies are going to change. Yet the biggest problem, as Hedges sees it, is American denial — an eagerness to cling to the good-times, anything-we-want illusion, "the the dark message of corporatism," at the expense of this perilous end-of-empire reality.
For all his years in journalism, Hedges has never been hesitant to step outside the lines and draw conclusions in a pointedly "progressive" point of view. He lost his job at The New York Times, in fact, for speaking out against the war in the months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nationalism and myth were at the heart of his breakout book, "War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning," which was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle award for non-fiction in 2002.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hedges attended divinity school before embarking on a career in journalism. An avowed socialst, he claims to have voted for Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic presidential primary of 2008 and Independent candidate Ralph Nader in the election. He does not associate the word "hope" with the word "Obama." He does not own a television. As a gesture of protest, he once wrote he would not pay federal income taxes in the event of a U.S. invasion of Iran.
Last month, three days after the Fort Hood tragedy, Hedges spoke at St. Andrews Presbyterian church in a program moderated by University of Texas journalism professor and peace activist Robert Jensen. Fort Hood didn't come up in the conversation, or the question-and-answer session that followed. But these topics, from "Empire of Illusion," did:
American Illusion
"You strive toward a dream; you live within an illusion. And societies that cannot distinguish between illusion and reality die. If you look at the twilight periods of all great empires – Roman, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian — there is, in those final moments, not only a deep moral degeneration but an inability to distinguish what is real from fantasy.
"During the election between McCain and Obama, we were waging two wars, pre-emptive wars that under post Nurmberg laws are defined as criminal wars of aggression. We were running offshore penal colonies where we openly tortured individuals stripped of all rights. We had suspended habeas corpus. We had engaged in warrant-less wiretapping and eavesdropping on tens of millions of Americans . ... And yet we spoke of ourselves as the greatest democracy on Earth – and that as the embodiment of the highest values, we had a right to deliver it to others by force."
American Values
"We talk about (the importance of) American culture. (But in truth): American culture was destroyed after World War I, with the rise of Madison Avenue and the implanting of mass corporate culture which sought to instill new values into the American consciousness. Instead of the values of thrift, communitarianism, modesty (and) self-sacrifice, we developed, courtesy of the advertising industry, this cult of self — this deep narcissism and hedonism that disconnected us from others and gave us mass corporate culture.
"So it's not American culture that we embrace for the moment. It's not American culture we export. It's corporate culture. And I think that altered situations will force us back into a moral system that defies the dark ethic of corporatism. And hopefully reconnects us to those values within our past that I think were brought us closer to fostering the building of common good.
'Vocational America'
"Education in the United States has become vocational. ... Many of the state universities, community colleges and online for-profit universities — that are growing faster than any other university sentiment — have no use for the Humanities, literature, history, philosophy, classics, art. Why? Because the Humanities ask the kind of broad questions of meaning that those systems that prize above all else vocational workers do not want to ask.
"The problem with our vocational system is that it measures and rewards a very narrow kind of intelligence, a kind of analytical intelligence to create legions of systems managers — people who have a drone-like ability to work for very long hours, and (have) a kind of penchant or capacity for manipulation, but don't know how to question assumptions or structures."
'The Liberal Church'
"I come out of a liberal church. The liberal church has failed us, and they've failed us on two levels. (First), they have defined spirituality as 'How is it with me,' which is a form of narcissism. Martin Luther King preached a great sermon called, 'Jesus didn't come to bring us peace of mind.' And secondly, they have failed us because they did not stand up to the Christian right. The Christian right is a mass movement, I think the most dangerous mass movement in American history — and they are Christian heretics.
"They have acculturated the Christian Gospel with the worst aspects of American imperialism and American Capitalism. Jesus did not come to give us a Cadillac and to make us rich and to bless arm fragmentation bombs being dropped all over the Middle East. It was an utter perversion of the message of the Gospel. And because the liberal church lacked the fortitude and the spine to renounce this movement — leaving it to repugnant figures like Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris ... at a time when the culture so desperately needs a moral voice, the church sadly to me has become in many ways morally irrelevant.
Capitalism
"Capitalism is probably ingrained in human nature. But there are different kinds of capitalism. The kind of penny capitalism that I saw at the farmer's market in the town I grew up in is not a dangerous form of capitalism ... but corporate capitalism is something else. Corporate Capitalism is cannibalizing the nation.
"Karl Polanyi in 1944 wrote a brilliant work called 'The Great Transformation' in which he talked about the inevitable totalitarianism and wars and breakdown that was caused by a system that permitted unregulated capitalists to flourish. When everything becomes a commodity, including human labor, when the natural world becomes a commodity that is valued only by its capacity to generate profit, then you commit collective suicide, because you exhaust human beings and human resources, you deplete them, until they die. And that's precisely what's happening. Look at the oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, our permanent war economy. ..."
Capitalism and Celebrity
"The ethic of celebrity culture ... is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. What are the values promoted on reality television programs like "Survivor"? A capacity for manipulation. Building false friendships (with) those you betray. A destruction of real community and solidarity. Basically: the traits of psychopaths. And what do you get in return? Fleeting fame and money.
"Well, that is the ethic of Wall Street. That is what allowed the titans of large corporations to fleece their shareholders, people who had put month by month small sums aside for their retirement, for their college, destroy these institutions like Lehman Brothers, and then like Richard Fuld did, walk away with a severance package of $45 million. The ethic of celebrity culture is the ethic of Wall Street. And the crisis that faces the country at its core is not so much an economic crisis or a political crisis as it is a moral crisis.
The Bankruptcy of Liberalism
"I fear more the bankruptcy of liberalism than I do the fanaticism of the right. ... I think the book for our times is probably Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground," (1864) in which he writes about a defeated dreamer, who becomes a cynic at a time when liberalism is bankrupt and who descends into a state of moral nihilism ... which understood precisely where his country was going."
The Failure of Democrats
"Those of us who care about the working class in this country – and much of my own family comes from the working class — should have walked out on the Democratic party in 1994 when they passed NAFTA. That thrust a knife in the back of the working class in this country – followed by Clinton's so-called welfare reform, followed by a Democratic party that quite consciously did the bidding of corporations to receive (campaign) money. That was the intent. So by the 1990s, the Democratic party had parity with the Republicans in terms of corporate donations — and of course now they get more.
"The bankruptcy of American liberalism is that it continued to speak against war, continued to speak on behalf of the working class, continued to support constitutional rights, and yet backed the party (the Democratic party) that betrayed all of these values. This wasn't lost on the working class. The anger of the working class toward liberals in this country is not misplaced, because liberals continue with that type of hypocrisy. They continue to espouse values and yet support political parties that tear down those values. And that's very dangerous. . . .
"The progressive movements in this country rely on the working class to propel our democracy fowrward. (But) our working class has been decimated. It doesn't exist any more, because there are no jobs, no meaningful jobs. And so that rage and frustration which you're already seeing leaping up around the fringes of society — and of course America is a very violent nation, that undercurrent of violence runs very deep — is presaging, I fear, a backwash. But a right wing backwash. And that is largely because the liberal class in this country became gutless."
Health Care
"Any discussion of health care in this country should begin with the factual acknowledgment that the for-profit health care industry is a problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that's not only responsible last year for the deaths of 20,000 Americans who could not get proper health care, medical coverage. But it (is) legally allowed (to) hold sick children hostage while parents bankrupt themselves to try to save their sons and daughters. This is a system, in theological terms, of death.
"Our for-profit health care system makes money off of death, the same way our arms merchants make money off of death. And the inability within our country to face this reality, the inability in a corporatized media to even have this discussion is, I think, evidence of the power of the corporate state, which drives debate, which permits institutions that are morally bankrupt to have a seat at the table. And that is symptomatic of a society in deep decay."
Violence
"When you push a populace to violence, you unleash a poison that infects everyone. I don't believe in the term "A Just War." ... And the longer we continue to speak to those in the Middle East through the language of violence, the more we empower those who are only capable of speaking back to us in the language of violence. When you look at 9/11: huge explosions and death above the city skyline, nihilistic violence as a message. Where did they learn that from? From (Secretary of Defense Robert) McNamara of '65, when he justified the bombing of North Vietnam, which left hundred of thousands of Vietnamese dead, (in the name of) delivering a message to Hanoi.
The perpetrators of 9/11 simply learned to speak the langue we taught them. ... You cannot promote a virtue through force. ... You cannot implant democracy through force. Because once you use force, you speak in a language in which the very concept of human rights is an absurdity."
Faith
"I'm a Christian Agnostic — which means, and I think that's probably biblically accurate, that I know nothing, and I believe I can know nothing, about God.
"God is a human concept. God has been given by various theological systems – our own and others – numerous attributes, some of which are morally repugnant. But the reality of the transcendent is something that artists and religious thinkers — who of course in early history were fused into one — have struggled to document.
"Marcel Proust wrote that the real news of our lives never appears in a newspaper. The most powerful forces of human life are non-rational – not irrational, but non-rational: Grief, love, beauty, search for meaning, struggle with our own mortality. You can't empirically measure these forces. The Buddhists say you can memorize as many sutras as you want, it will never make you wise. If you're not in touch with these forces – and Paul Woodruff wrote a great book about this, 'Reverence' – you're not a complete human being."
bbuchholz@statesman.com; (512) 912-2967
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Prince of Blackness
Is Erik Prince 'Graymailing' the US Government?
By Jeremy Scahill
December 4, 2009
The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels--not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story's author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince's forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world's most famous mercenary's insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. "The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges," says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. "He absolutely would not do these things otherwise."
Jeremy Scahill: Top Blackwater staff authorized attempted bribes of Iraqi officials in the wake of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, the New York Times has reported.
There is no doubt Prince is in the legal cross-hairs: There are reportedly two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings; and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his company were central players. "Obviously, Prince does know a lot and the government has to realize that once they start prosecuting him," says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "In some ways, graymail is what any good defense lawyer would do. This is something that's in your arsenal."
Perhaps the most prominent case of graymail was by Oliver North when he and his lawyers used it to force dismissal of the most serious charges against him stemming from his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. In another case, known as Khazak-gate, a US businessman, James Giffen, allegedly paid $78 million in bribes to former Khazakh Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbayev in an attempt to win contracts for western oil companies to develop the Tengiz oil fields in the 1990s. In 1993, he was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the largest overseas bribery case in history. After Giffen was indicted, he claimed that if he did what he was accused of, he did it in the service of US intelligence agencies. The case has been in limbo ever since.
"This is as old as the hills as a tactic and it has a long track record of being very effective against the government," says Horton. "It's basically a threat to the government that if you prosecute me, I'll disclose all sorts of national security-sensitive information. The bottom line here is it's like an act of extortion or a threat: you do X and this is what I'm going to do." Horton said that the Vanity Fair article was Prince "essentially putting out the warning to the Department of Justice: 'You prosecute me and all this stuff will be out on the record.'"
According to Ciralsky's article, Prince was a "full-blown asset" of "the C.I.A.'s National Resources Division [which] recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest:"
Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince's handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a "201 file," which would have put him on the agency's books as a vetted asset. It's not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations...
Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating "hard target" countries--where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency's designs. "I made no money whatsoever off this work," Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. "I'm painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I'm paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket."
"I think that [Prince] will use all of his information and his knowledge of these secret dealings in basically what is an extortion play: 'You come after me, and I'll spill the beans on everything,'" says Horton. "That's the essence of graymail and the Department of Justice will usually get its feathers all ruffled up and they'll say, 'You can't deal with the government like this. This is unfair and improper.' But in the end, it usually works."
In the Vanity Fair article, Prince alleges that he was outed--by whom he does not say, but the implication is that CIA Director Leon Panetta named him in a closed door hearing of the Intelligence Committee last June, and then the name was leaked by one of the attendees of that hearing. Sloan, the former federal prosecutor, said that if what Prince says in the Vanity Fair article about his role in secret CIA programs is true, he has a case that laws were broken in revealing his identity. "I'm not his fan, but he's not wrong. For somebody to leak his identity as a CIA asset clearly merits a criminal investigation," Sloan said. "Whether they should have ever hired Erik Prince or made him into an asset is a separate question. Assuming he really was a CIA asset, basically a spy, an undercover operative, and somebody decided to leak that, that's not acceptable and that is a violation of the same law that leaking Valerie [Plame]'s identity was. If you can't leak one person, you can't leak any person, not just the people you like versus the people you don't like."
While much of the focus in the Vanity Fair story was on Prince's work with the CIA, the story also confirmed that Blackwater has an ongoing relationship with the US Special Forces, helping plan missions and providing air support. As The Nation reported, Blackwater has for years been working on a classified contract with the Joint Special Operations Command in a drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, as well as planning snatch-and-grab missions and targeted assassinations. Part of what may be happening behind closed doors is that the CIA is, to an extent, cutting Blackwater and Prince off. But, as sources have told The Nation, the company remains a central player in US Special Forces operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Prince's choice of Adam Ciralsky to tell his story is an interesting one as well. Ciralsky was a CIA lawyer who in 1997 was suspended under suspicion he was having unauthorized contacts with possible Israeli intelligence agents. Ciralsky vehemently denied the allegations, saying he was the victim of a "witch-hunt" at the Agency. In any case, there is no question that Prince would view Ciralsky through the lens of his own struggle against the CIA. "When I saw the article, the first thing that just leapt off the page was his name. I thought, 'My god, why would he go to Adam?'" said Horton. "And then I read the article and I thought, of course he'd go to Adam. There is this legal theme being developed in the article and Adam, as a lawyer who had dealt with the CIA, fully understands that. I mean I think he fully understood he was going to do a piece that would help Prince develop his legal defense and that's what this is. The amazing thing to me is that Vanity Fair printed it. Do the editors of Vanity Fair not understand what's going on here?"
About Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.
By Jeremy Scahill
December 4, 2009
The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels--not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story's author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince's forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world's most famous mercenary's insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. "The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges," says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. "He absolutely would not do these things otherwise."
Jeremy Scahill: Top Blackwater staff authorized attempted bribes of Iraqi officials in the wake of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, the New York Times has reported.
There is no doubt Prince is in the legal cross-hairs: There are reportedly two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings; and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his company were central players. "Obviously, Prince does know a lot and the government has to realize that once they start prosecuting him," says Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "In some ways, graymail is what any good defense lawyer would do. This is something that's in your arsenal."
Perhaps the most prominent case of graymail was by Oliver North when he and his lawyers used it to force dismissal of the most serious charges against him stemming from his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair. In another case, known as Khazak-gate, a US businessman, James Giffen, allegedly paid $78 million in bribes to former Khazakh Prime Minister Nurlan Balgimbayev in an attempt to win contracts for western oil companies to develop the Tengiz oil fields in the 1990s. In 1993, he was charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the largest overseas bribery case in history. After Giffen was indicted, he claimed that if he did what he was accused of, he did it in the service of US intelligence agencies. The case has been in limbo ever since.
"This is as old as the hills as a tactic and it has a long track record of being very effective against the government," says Horton. "It's basically a threat to the government that if you prosecute me, I'll disclose all sorts of national security-sensitive information. The bottom line here is it's like an act of extortion or a threat: you do X and this is what I'm going to do." Horton said that the Vanity Fair article was Prince "essentially putting out the warning to the Department of Justice: 'You prosecute me and all this stuff will be out on the record.'"
According to Ciralsky's article, Prince was a "full-blown asset" of "the C.I.A.'s National Resources Division [which] recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest:"
Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince's handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a "201 file," which would have put him on the agency's books as a vetted asset. It's not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations...
Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating "hard target" countries--where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency's designs. "I made no money whatsoever off this work," Prince contends. He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays. "I'm painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I'm paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket."
"I think that [Prince] will use all of his information and his knowledge of these secret dealings in basically what is an extortion play: 'You come after me, and I'll spill the beans on everything,'" says Horton. "That's the essence of graymail and the Department of Justice will usually get its feathers all ruffled up and they'll say, 'You can't deal with the government like this. This is unfair and improper.' But in the end, it usually works."
In the Vanity Fair article, Prince alleges that he was outed--by whom he does not say, but the implication is that CIA Director Leon Panetta named him in a closed door hearing of the Intelligence Committee last June, and then the name was leaked by one of the attendees of that hearing. Sloan, the former federal prosecutor, said that if what Prince says in the Vanity Fair article about his role in secret CIA programs is true, he has a case that laws were broken in revealing his identity. "I'm not his fan, but he's not wrong. For somebody to leak his identity as a CIA asset clearly merits a criminal investigation," Sloan said. "Whether they should have ever hired Erik Prince or made him into an asset is a separate question. Assuming he really was a CIA asset, basically a spy, an undercover operative, and somebody decided to leak that, that's not acceptable and that is a violation of the same law that leaking Valerie [Plame]'s identity was. If you can't leak one person, you can't leak any person, not just the people you like versus the people you don't like."
While much of the focus in the Vanity Fair story was on Prince's work with the CIA, the story also confirmed that Blackwater has an ongoing relationship with the US Special Forces, helping plan missions and providing air support. As The Nation reported, Blackwater has for years been working on a classified contract with the Joint Special Operations Command in a drone bombing campaign in Pakistan, as well as planning snatch-and-grab missions and targeted assassinations. Part of what may be happening behind closed doors is that the CIA is, to an extent, cutting Blackwater and Prince off. But, as sources have told The Nation, the company remains a central player in US Special Forces operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Prince's choice of Adam Ciralsky to tell his story is an interesting one as well. Ciralsky was a CIA lawyer who in 1997 was suspended under suspicion he was having unauthorized contacts with possible Israeli intelligence agents. Ciralsky vehemently denied the allegations, saying he was the victim of a "witch-hunt" at the Agency. In any case, there is no question that Prince would view Ciralsky through the lens of his own struggle against the CIA. "When I saw the article, the first thing that just leapt off the page was his name. I thought, 'My god, why would he go to Adam?'" said Horton. "And then I read the article and I thought, of course he'd go to Adam. There is this legal theme being developed in the article and Adam, as a lawyer who had dealt with the CIA, fully understands that. I mean I think he fully understood he was going to do a piece that would help Prince develop his legal defense and that's what this is. The amazing thing to me is that Vanity Fair printed it. Do the editors of Vanity Fair not understand what's going on here?"
About Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.
The Nichepaper Manifesto
The Nichepaper Manifesto
Dear Newspaper Magnates,
So you're going to try and charge people for news yet again. Cart, meet horse.
Journalists didn't make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did. 20th century newspapers were never supernormally profitable because of what they wrote: it was the natural monopoly dynamics of classifieds that fueled massive margins.
In the 21st century, it's time, again for newspapers to learn how to profit with stakeholders — instead of extracting profits from them. The 21st century's great challenge isn't selling the same old "product" better: it's learning to make radically better stuff in the first place. Here's how to begin building 21st century newspapers.
***
20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news.
A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche. (Here's a nice, timely discussion of Nichepapers by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.)
Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.
Nichepapers aren't a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They're a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They're not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what "news" is.
Here are eight of the most essential:
Knowledge, not news. Newspapers strive to give people the news. Next stop, commodity central. Nichepapers strive to impart meaningful, lasting knowledge instead.
Commentage, not commentary. Newspapers dictate to their reader what news and opinion are. Nichepapers co-create knowledge through "commentage." Commentage is the kid sister of reportage: it is the art of curating comments to have a dialogue with the audience — because the audience can fill gaps, plug holes, and thicken the foundations of knowledge. Many newspapers have comments — so what? Almost none are having a dialogue with commenters — who are mostly stuck in a twilight zone where they can only talk to one another. Nichepapers, in contrast, are always having deep dialogues with readers.
Topics, not articles. That's why Nichepapers develop topics — instead of telling quickly-forgotten stories. When Talking Points Memo exposed the Bush administration's series of politically motivated firings, it did so in a series of posts, that let the story develop, surface, thicken, and climax. Stories are for information — topics are for knowledge.
Scarcity, not circulation. Newspapers strive for circulation, by telling the same stories in the same ways — in slightly different places. Nichepapers strive for scarcity: to develop a perspective, analytical skills, and storytelling capabilities that are inimitable by rivals.
Now, not then. Newspapers give you the news then. Nichepapers give you knowledge now. Why have weekly columns and daily articles — that then get lost in the wilderness of a vast archive? It's an arcane, obsolete way to produce content. Nichepapers develop topics of conversation, not individual stories, and let them co-evolve with readers.
Provocation, not perfection. Newspapers seek perfection: perfect grammar, perfect ledes, perfect headlines. Nichepapers seek provocation instead. Sometimes, yes, that provocation is mere titillation. But more often than not it's authentic provcation: nichepapers provoke us to think; they challenge us; they educate us in ways that newspapers stopped doing long ago.
Snowballs, not sell-outs. Newspapers long ago sold out to advertisers, PR flaks, powerful "sources," and lobbyists. When was the last time the WSJ bit the hand that fed it? Why is the Post's editorial page so predictably tepid? Nichepapers haven't sold out — and if their economic promise delivers, they won't have to. They "sell in" instead: they pitch topics and stories to the community, and let the best ones snowball — through contributions like tips, criticisms, and corrections.
Tasks, not tech. Nichepapers aren't about technology. They might use a blog post, vlog post, podcast, wiki, series of tweets, or a long-form article — or all of these, all at once. They are tech-neutral, using whatever works best for a given task.
Here are four models for Nichepapers that apply these rules in different ways. Each is named after an archetypal historical newspaper — because the key to reinvention is getting back to the basics of making better stuff:
The Sentry — Talking Points Memo. The incomparable TPM is the gold standard of a Nichepaper. It's also a very specific kind: a sentry, always patrolling the political arena for malfeasance, misbehavior, and broken promises. By combining reportage, commentage, opinion, and muckraking, TPM delivers perhaps the most hard-hitting, most persistent, and most fearless investigative political journalism in America today.
The Chronicle — Perez Hilton. Perez Hilton is the first 21st century gossip columnist. He chronicles whatever's lewd, crude, and most likely to be viewed in the entertainment world — in such excruciating detail, the result is a paradox: the lurid becomes banal. Yet, like TPM, Perez is unafraid to challenge the status quo, persistently, chronically, and often, funnily.
The Intelligencer — Business Insider. Henry Blodget used to be an equity analyst, so it's no surprise that his latest venture, Business Insider, crosses the line from pure news into deeper analysis — intelligence. Though BI often gets it wrong (here's Joe Weisenthal arguing that bribes create value, for example), the analysis is what counts: it gives readers more food for thought per word than News 1.0.
The Pioneer — The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is perhaps the classic Nichepaper — and what makes it different is that it's always pioneering new ideas, concepts, stories, and angles. The HuffPo's perspective is politically liberal — and that's its domain. But it is the pioneering that makes the HuffPo different. And it's open to pioneering new ideas from nearly anyone — as long as their ideas are good enough to matter.
Those rules and models above aren't the only ones, or the best ones. They are avenues that radical innovators are already exploring to reconceive news for the 21st century. And they suggest what the endgame of news 2.0 looks like.
The 21st century news organization is a portfolio of the different kinds of nichepapers. An Intelligencer for healthcare, a Pioneer for education, a Chronicle for finance and entertainment — that's what the future of news looks like. Why?
Nichepapers are the future of news because their economics are superior. All the Nichepapers above are "real" enterprises, with staff, offices, and fixed and variable costs. Nichepapers offer more bang for the buck: greater benefits for far less cost. Readers get more, better, and faster content — while publishers realize lower capital intensity, lower distribution, marketing, and production costs, and less risk. What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness.
And that's really the point.
Profitability can't be recaptured from a commodity. Newspapers used to be yesterday's most profitable industry. Warren Buffett made his fortune by investing in newspapers, yesterday. Yet, today, business model innovation, aka "monetization," is the surest, quickest path to self-destruction. Charging once more for the same old "content" — as argued for by David Simon, in an impassioned CJR article — will inevitably lead newspapers exactly where it led banks investment "banks" and automakers: into economic implosion.
To reinvent the buying and selling of news, it's necessary first to reconceive the making of news. The AP's latest attempt at business model innovation, for example, is a heavyweight "rights management" system for the same old stuff. But protecting yesterday's "product" is exactly what prevented the music industry and Hollywood from rediscovering the art of value creation.
Nichepapers are, above all, "M" organizations. Today's radical innovators are confronting the truth that, because it failed the fundamental test of being meaningful, yesterday's news is, well, yesterday's news.
Nichepapers, in contrast, do meaningful stuff that matters the most. The great failing of 20th century news is that monopoly power became a substitute for meaningful value creation. At root, that's the lesson that newspapers are learning the hard way.
Love,
Umair and the Edge Economy Community
Dear Newspaper Magnates,
So you're going to try and charge people for news yet again. Cart, meet horse.
Journalists didn't make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did. 20th century newspapers were never supernormally profitable because of what they wrote: it was the natural monopoly dynamics of classifieds that fueled massive margins.
In the 21st century, it's time, again for newspapers to learn how to profit with stakeholders — instead of extracting profits from them. The 21st century's great challenge isn't selling the same old "product" better: it's learning to make radically better stuff in the first place. Here's how to begin building 21st century newspapers.
***
20th century news isn't fit for 21st century society. Yesterday's approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It's time for a better kind of news.
A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry's nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche. (Here's a nice, timely discussion of Nichepapers by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.)
Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.
Nichepapers aren't a new product, service, or business model. They are a new institution. They're a living example of the institutional innovation that is the key to 21st century business. They're not the same old newspaper, sold a different way. They are 21st century newspapers, built on new rules, that are letting radical innovators reinvent what "news" is.
Here are eight of the most essential:
Knowledge, not news. Newspapers strive to give people the news. Next stop, commodity central. Nichepapers strive to impart meaningful, lasting knowledge instead.
Commentage, not commentary. Newspapers dictate to their reader what news and opinion are. Nichepapers co-create knowledge through "commentage." Commentage is the kid sister of reportage: it is the art of curating comments to have a dialogue with the audience — because the audience can fill gaps, plug holes, and thicken the foundations of knowledge. Many newspapers have comments — so what? Almost none are having a dialogue with commenters — who are mostly stuck in a twilight zone where they can only talk to one another. Nichepapers, in contrast, are always having deep dialogues with readers.
Topics, not articles. That's why Nichepapers develop topics — instead of telling quickly-forgotten stories. When Talking Points Memo exposed the Bush administration's series of politically motivated firings, it did so in a series of posts, that let the story develop, surface, thicken, and climax. Stories are for information — topics are for knowledge.
Scarcity, not circulation. Newspapers strive for circulation, by telling the same stories in the same ways — in slightly different places. Nichepapers strive for scarcity: to develop a perspective, analytical skills, and storytelling capabilities that are inimitable by rivals.
Now, not then. Newspapers give you the news then. Nichepapers give you knowledge now. Why have weekly columns and daily articles — that then get lost in the wilderness of a vast archive? It's an arcane, obsolete way to produce content. Nichepapers develop topics of conversation, not individual stories, and let them co-evolve with readers.
Provocation, not perfection. Newspapers seek perfection: perfect grammar, perfect ledes, perfect headlines. Nichepapers seek provocation instead. Sometimes, yes, that provocation is mere titillation. But more often than not it's authentic provcation: nichepapers provoke us to think; they challenge us; they educate us in ways that newspapers stopped doing long ago.
Snowballs, not sell-outs. Newspapers long ago sold out to advertisers, PR flaks, powerful "sources," and lobbyists. When was the last time the WSJ bit the hand that fed it? Why is the Post's editorial page so predictably tepid? Nichepapers haven't sold out — and if their economic promise delivers, they won't have to. They "sell in" instead: they pitch topics and stories to the community, and let the best ones snowball — through contributions like tips, criticisms, and corrections.
Tasks, not tech. Nichepapers aren't about technology. They might use a blog post, vlog post, podcast, wiki, series of tweets, or a long-form article — or all of these, all at once. They are tech-neutral, using whatever works best for a given task.
Here are four models for Nichepapers that apply these rules in different ways. Each is named after an archetypal historical newspaper — because the key to reinvention is getting back to the basics of making better stuff:
The Sentry — Talking Points Memo. The incomparable TPM is the gold standard of a Nichepaper. It's also a very specific kind: a sentry, always patrolling the political arena for malfeasance, misbehavior, and broken promises. By combining reportage, commentage, opinion, and muckraking, TPM delivers perhaps the most hard-hitting, most persistent, and most fearless investigative political journalism in America today.
The Chronicle — Perez Hilton. Perez Hilton is the first 21st century gossip columnist. He chronicles whatever's lewd, crude, and most likely to be viewed in the entertainment world — in such excruciating detail, the result is a paradox: the lurid becomes banal. Yet, like TPM, Perez is unafraid to challenge the status quo, persistently, chronically, and often, funnily.
The Intelligencer — Business Insider. Henry Blodget used to be an equity analyst, so it's no surprise that his latest venture, Business Insider, crosses the line from pure news into deeper analysis — intelligence. Though BI often gets it wrong (here's Joe Weisenthal arguing that bribes create value, for example), the analysis is what counts: it gives readers more food for thought per word than News 1.0.
The Pioneer — The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is perhaps the classic Nichepaper — and what makes it different is that it's always pioneering new ideas, concepts, stories, and angles. The HuffPo's perspective is politically liberal — and that's its domain. But it is the pioneering that makes the HuffPo different. And it's open to pioneering new ideas from nearly anyone — as long as their ideas are good enough to matter.
Those rules and models above aren't the only ones, or the best ones. They are avenues that radical innovators are already exploring to reconceive news for the 21st century. And they suggest what the endgame of news 2.0 looks like.
The 21st century news organization is a portfolio of the different kinds of nichepapers. An Intelligencer for healthcare, a Pioneer for education, a Chronicle for finance and entertainment — that's what the future of news looks like. Why?
Nichepapers are the future of news because their economics are superior. All the Nichepapers above are "real" enterprises, with staff, offices, and fixed and variable costs. Nichepapers offer more bang for the buck: greater benefits for far less cost. Readers get more, better, and faster content — while publishers realize lower capital intensity, lower distribution, marketing, and production costs, and less risk. What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness.
And that's really the point.
Profitability can't be recaptured from a commodity. Newspapers used to be yesterday's most profitable industry. Warren Buffett made his fortune by investing in newspapers, yesterday. Yet, today, business model innovation, aka "monetization," is the surest, quickest path to self-destruction. Charging once more for the same old "content" — as argued for by David Simon, in an impassioned CJR article — will inevitably lead newspapers exactly where it led banks investment "banks" and automakers: into economic implosion.
To reinvent the buying and selling of news, it's necessary first to reconceive the making of news. The AP's latest attempt at business model innovation, for example, is a heavyweight "rights management" system for the same old stuff. But protecting yesterday's "product" is exactly what prevented the music industry and Hollywood from rediscovering the art of value creation.
Nichepapers are, above all, "M" organizations. Today's radical innovators are confronting the truth that, because it failed the fundamental test of being meaningful, yesterday's news is, well, yesterday's news.
Nichepapers, in contrast, do meaningful stuff that matters the most. The great failing of 20th century news is that monopoly power became a substitute for meaningful value creation. At root, that's the lesson that newspapers are learning the hard way.
Love,
Umair and the Edge Economy Community
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Norwegian Lice Threaten Salmon Extinction
Sea lice are out of control in Norway
Norway's state broadcaster NRK reported on Monday:
"In the past year, the amount of sea lice in Norwegian fish farms exploded. The industry has been on the hump of the environmental movement in the wake of illness boom. This is because the salmon lice infect the wild salmon, and thereby threaten wild salmon stocks.": http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hordaland/1.6888215
The Green Warriors of Norway said in a press release - "Sea Lice Situation is Out of Control" - issued yesterday:
"The sea lice situation is now out of control along the entire coast of Nordland and south. Green Warriors of Norway requires complete slaughter of all salmon biomass with multi-resistance against lice medicines": http://www.nmf.no/default.aspx?pageId=121&articleId=2354&news=1
The Norwegian Hunters and Fishers (NJFF), Norwegian Salmon Rivers Owners (Norsk Lakseelver) and WWF Norway called on the Fisheries Minister to take the sea lice problem more seriously. NJFF reported yesterday under the headline "A Lot of Talk - Little Action":
"......life-threatening situation for our wild salmon along the coast is informed by a disaster. The trend of increasing resistance to the main treatment methods are cause for great concern. The organizations ask that the Minister immediately initiated after a standstill for further growth in the industry......We will increase the pressure in this case. The battle is now": http://www.njff.no/portal/page/portal/njff/nyhet?element_id=57753689&displaypage=TRUE
The Norwegian Salmon Association reported last week under the headline "Norway is managing the extinction of wild salmon!":
"The Director of The Directorate for Nature Management, Janne Sollie, says today that Norway is not managing the farmed salmon business, but the extinction of wild salmon! She says this due to the fact of record high and disastrous levels of sea-lice in the farmed salmon farms. If this is allowed to keep on, all wild salmon will be history!
The Directorate for Nature Management is the national governmental body for preserving Norway's natural environment. The directorate serves as an advisory and executive agency under the Norwegian Ministry of Environment. The Government do not listen to their warning! It's shameful how Norway's officials are promoting and protecting the business of farmed salmon! An unsustainable business ruining wild life!": http://norwegian-salmon.com/salmon/extended-en.php?recID=262
[Sea lice data for Norwegian salmon farms can be accessed online via: www.lusedata.no ]
3) The Green Warriors of Norway (led by Kurt Oddekalv) revealed that "Norwegian commercial fish farms are once more using these [diflubenzuron and teflubenzuron] controversial chemicals to get rid of salmon lice". NMF reported today:
"The use of these chemicals was stopped after the agreement was signed in February 1999, and fish farmers have used other drugs instead. However, since the salmon louse has developed resistance against the drugs used, these controversial chemicals are again being thrown into Norwegian salmon cages. The industry respected the agreement until now, and we claim the minister of fisheries to be responsible for breaking the agreement": http://nmf.no/default.aspx?pageId=42&articleId=2361&news=1
The Norwegian media reported this extensively today via NRK, Dagbladet, Adresseavisen and other media outlets:
"Truer med å sverte norsk laks: Miljøkriger Kurt Oddekalv mener regjeringen har brutt avtale, og vurderer derfor internasjonal aksjon" (NRK, 2nd December): http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hordaland/1.6891582
"Slik presset Oddekalv regjeringen - Miljøaktivisten truet Bondevik-regjeringen til å minimalisere bruken av to omstridte lusemiddel. Nå er avtalen brutt, mener Oddekalv, som på nytt truer med internasjonal kampanjer mot norsk laks i utlandet" (Adresseavisen, 2nd December): http://www.adressa.no/nyheter/innenriks/article1417790.ece
"Regjeringen inngikk avtale med Kurt Oddekalv: Hvis laksenæringen kuttet på bruken av to omstridte lusemidler, skulle Miljøvernforbundet avstå fra planlagte aksjoner" (Dagbladet, 2nd December): http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/12/02/nyheter/innenriks/miljo/politikk/regjeringen/9303659/
Details in English via: "The deal is broken by the Minister" (NMF, 2nd December): http://nmf.no/default.aspx?pageId=42&articleId=2361&news=1
Norway's state broadcaster NRK reported on Monday:
"In the past year, the amount of sea lice in Norwegian fish farms exploded. The industry has been on the hump of the environmental movement in the wake of illness boom. This is because the salmon lice infect the wild salmon, and thereby threaten wild salmon stocks.": http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hordaland/1.6888215
The Green Warriors of Norway said in a press release - "Sea Lice Situation is Out of Control" - issued yesterday:
"The sea lice situation is now out of control along the entire coast of Nordland and south. Green Warriors of Norway requires complete slaughter of all salmon biomass with multi-resistance against lice medicines": http://www.nmf.no/default.aspx?pageId=121&articleId=2354&news=1
The Norwegian Hunters and Fishers (NJFF), Norwegian Salmon Rivers Owners (Norsk Lakseelver) and WWF Norway called on the Fisheries Minister to take the sea lice problem more seriously. NJFF reported yesterday under the headline "A Lot of Talk - Little Action":
"......life-threatening situation for our wild salmon along the coast is informed by a disaster. The trend of increasing resistance to the main treatment methods are cause for great concern. The organizations ask that the Minister immediately initiated after a standstill for further growth in the industry......We will increase the pressure in this case. The battle is now": http://www.njff.no/portal/page/portal/njff/nyhet?element_id=57753689&displaypage=TRUE
The Norwegian Salmon Association reported last week under the headline "Norway is managing the extinction of wild salmon!":
"The Director of The Directorate for Nature Management, Janne Sollie, says today that Norway is not managing the farmed salmon business, but the extinction of wild salmon! She says this due to the fact of record high and disastrous levels of sea-lice in the farmed salmon farms. If this is allowed to keep on, all wild salmon will be history!
The Directorate for Nature Management is the national governmental body for preserving Norway's natural environment. The directorate serves as an advisory and executive agency under the Norwegian Ministry of Environment. The Government do not listen to their warning! It's shameful how Norway's officials are promoting and protecting the business of farmed salmon! An unsustainable business ruining wild life!": http://norwegian-salmon.com/salmon/extended-en.php?recID=262
[Sea lice data for Norwegian salmon farms can be accessed online via: www.lusedata.no
3) The Green Warriors of Norway (led by Kurt Oddekalv) revealed that "Norwegian commercial fish farms are once more using these [diflubenzuron and teflubenzuron] controversial chemicals to get rid of salmon lice". NMF reported today:
"The use of these chemicals was stopped after the agreement was signed in February 1999, and fish farmers have used other drugs instead. However, since the salmon louse has developed resistance against the drugs used, these controversial chemicals are again being thrown into Norwegian salmon cages. The industry respected the agreement until now, and we claim the minister of fisheries to be responsible for breaking the agreement": http://nmf.no/default.aspx?pageId=42&articleId=2361&news=1
The Norwegian media reported this extensively today via NRK, Dagbladet, Adresseavisen and other media outlets:
"Truer med å sverte norsk laks: Miljøkriger Kurt Oddekalv mener regjeringen har brutt avtale, og vurderer derfor internasjonal aksjon" (NRK, 2nd December): http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/hordaland/1.6891582
"Slik presset Oddekalv regjeringen - Miljøaktivisten truet Bondevik-regjeringen til å minimalisere bruken av to omstridte lusemiddel. Nå er avtalen brutt, mener Oddekalv, som på nytt truer med internasjonal kampanjer mot norsk laks i utlandet" (Adresseavisen, 2nd December): http://www.adressa.no/nyheter/innenriks/article1417790.ece
"Regjeringen inngikk avtale med Kurt Oddekalv: Hvis laksenæringen kuttet på bruken av to omstridte lusemidler, skulle Miljøvernforbundet avstå fra planlagte aksjoner" (Dagbladet, 2nd December): http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/12/02/nyheter/innenriks/miljo/politikk/regjeringen/9303659/
Details in English via: "The deal is broken by the Minister" (NMF, 2nd December): http://nmf.no/default.aspx?pageId=42&articleId=2361&news=1
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Canada as Global Pariah
Under Harper: Canada Will Remain a Global Environmental Pariah
by George Monbiot
As long as Stephen Harper’s government holds the reigns of power, Canada will remain a global environmental pariah.
The reasons why this is so are not hard to find, but they are seldom analyzed in public discourse on the issue.
To the extent that the Harper government has an economic strategy, beyond letting the marketplace take the country where it will, it is to make Canada an “energy superpower.” That goal, in turn, rests almost entirely on the massive development of the Alberta oil sands to extract oil for export to the United States. Finally, under the terms of NAFTA, the more oil Canada exports to the United States, the more oil it will be required to export in the future. Large scale oil sands development is incompatible with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. Indeed, Canada is en route to passing the United States as an emitter of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis.
Let’s examine each of the links in this chain of inter-connected realities.
With its close ties to the multinational and national petroleum companies operating in Alberta, the Harper government is dedicated to the proposition that Canada should be a secure base for rising petroleum exports to the United States, in short an “energy superpower.”
Indeed, over the past couple of decades, the American reliance on Canadian oil has grown steadily larger. In July 2006, at 1.6 million barrels a day, Canada was the largest single exporter of crude oil to the United States. Rounding out the top five exporters to the U.S. were Mexico with just over 1.5 million barrels daily, Saudi Arabia at over 1.2 million barrels, Venezuela with nearly 1.2 million barrels, and Nigeria with just over 1.0 million barrels. These five countries were the source of sixty-six per cent of American oil imports. What these totals make clear is the high dependence of the United States on Canada and other Western Hemisphere sources of oil and its relatively low reliance on Middle Eastern sources.
The Harper government’s vision of Canada as a major world petroleum exporter is based on the Alberta oil sands. As oil, national security and the war on terror have become tightly aligned in the thinking of American political leaders, Canada’s largest petroleum deposit, the oil sands, has been ever more closely scrutinized from Washington. Located across an enormous region of north-eastern Alberta---in three major areas spread over 140,800 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of Florida---centred on Fort McMurray about three hundred kilometers north of Edmonton---the oil sands contains almost as much oil as the conventional reserves of Saudi Arabia.
In the early years of this century, oil sands investments totaled nearly $200 billion. By the spring of 2008, oil sands production reached 1.3 million barrels a day, more than half of Canada’s oil production. Ten per cent of North American crude oil production already comes from the oil sands. Incredible as it may seem, the Alberta government produced one scenario that concluded that by 2050, the oil sands could produce eight million barrels of oil a day, transforming Alberta into a North American Saudi Arabia.
The vision of Canada as a vast supplier of petroleum from the oil sands for a thirsty United States is one that promotes dreams of enormous profits in the minds the executives of the petroleum companies and the investors in those companies.
But it is a truly dark vision for the simple reason that the industrial process by which oil is produced from the oil sands results in the release of an enormous volume of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Pursuing the vision commits Alberta, indeed Canada as a whole, to the emission of greenhouse gases on a gargantuan scale, exactly what the earth does not now need. Not only is the production of oil sands oil very expensive, it involves strip mining on a vast scale and the reduction of huge tracts of land to a scarred horror. The production of oil from the oil sands requires enormous inputs of fresh water and natural gas.
The oil sands has become by far the biggest source of greenhouse emissions in Canada. It is no exaggeration to say that without a steep reduction in the production of synthetic crude oil from the oil sands, all other programs in Canada to reduce emissions will be fruitless. Oil sands development has directly shaped the environmental policies of the Harper government.
Let’s look further into this matter of greenhouse gas emissions. The way to do this meaningfully in the lead up to the Copenhagen climate change conference is to tally the metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per country per capita per year. Then we can examine the total emissions of key countries.
Using 2006 figures, the per capita CO2 emissions of the United States were 19.78 metric tons, Canada 18.81, and Australia 20.58. These were the top emitters per capita among the major advanced countries. Further down the list were other major industrialized countries: Japan, 9.78; Germany, 10.40; U.K., 9.66; Italy, 8.05; and France, 6.60. Then we come to the major developing countries: China, 4.58; India, 1.16; Mexico, 4.05; and Brazil, 2.01.
Here are the total emissions of these countries for 2006 in millions of metric tons of CO2: China, 6017.69; United States, 5902.75; India, 1293.17; Japan, 1246.76; Germany, 857.60; Canada, 614.33; United Kingdom, 585.71; Italy, 468.19; Mexico, 435.60; France, 417.75; Australia, 417.06; and Brazil, 377.24.
When we break out the Canadian per capita emissions further, we find that between them Alberta and Saskatchewan (with Saskatchewan higher than Alberta) come in at a staggering 70. The rest of Canada scored 16.
What the figures tell us is that on a per capita basis, developed countries are much more serious emitters of greenhouse gases than are developing countries and that includes the two giants China and India. On the other hand, because of their gigantic populations, China and India are enormous emitters of CO2, respectively ranking number one and number four among the countries of the world.
The nub of the problem is that the developed countries established their high living standards by polluting, on a per capita basis, much more wantonly than the rest of the world. Developing countries are not prepared to allow developed countries to acquire a “grandfather” clause in climate change agreements that would allow them to go on polluting much more per capita than anyone else.
Developed countries, the United States in particular, is determined to be allowed to go on spewing out CO2 emissions, per capita, at a vastly higher rate than China, India or Brazil. The Europeans, who pollute less, are less committed to their right to pollute because they got there first, but they too pollute, per capita much more than China or India.
The Harper government is the worst of the bunch. Our government is determined to insert a rising rate of CO2 emissions right into the heart of our economic strategy. Right now, Canada’s per capita emissions of CO2 are close to five times as high as those of China. The emissions of Alberta and Saskatchewan are fifteen times as high as China’s on a per capita basis.
Any government committed to increasing the production of oil from the oil sands, precisely the position of the Harper government, is dedicated to the proposition that Canada should have the right for decades to come to pollute far more per capita than other countries. On this agenda, Canada will certainly pass the United States, per capita, in greenhouse gas emissions and will likely overtake Australia. Admittedly, it will be as a supplier of dirty oil to the United States that Canada will make itself a “pollution superpower”.
The members of the Harper government did not arrive at their environmental policy, relying on so-called intensity targets, which allow oil sands production to keep on rising as long as emissions-per-barrel go down, for nothing. They did it for the oldest of political reasons. As a government, they are serving the interests of oil companies that have tens of billions of dollars in future profits at stake. It’s as simple as that.
Finally, there’s the matter of NAFTA. Under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada has to continue exporting as much petroleum to the United States as it has been exporting on a rolling average of the previous three years. This means, among other things, that Canada would be required to continue its exports of petroleum to the U.S. even if imports of petroleum to eastern Canada from overseas were cut off as a consequence of a supply crisis generated by falling supplies or a geo-political conflict. This stipulation means that Canada has to make the supplying of the American petroleum market a higher priority than meeting the requirements of Canadian markets experiencing a shortage.
If, as the Harper government fervently wishes, the expansion of oil sands projects dramatically increases Canadian petroleum production, the country’s commitment to export more petroleum to the United States will rise in lock step. The whole point of more oil sands operations is to meet the oil requirements of the U.S.
The plain fact is that when you combine the Harper government’s economic strategy with the stipulations of NAFTA, this country is being locked into rising, not falling, CO2 emissions. Anyone who wants to change the course Canada is on with respect to climate change needs to come to terms with these hard realities. Anything else is nothing more than hot air.
Stephen Harper is going to Copenhagen because the presidents of the United States and China are going. He will be there to try to prevent a binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions from being achieved. As long as he remains in power, Canada will be a global pariah on the issue of climate change.
rowland morgan wrote:
This article is so awful that I feel an urge to mitigate it with some observations on what has brought Canada to this.
BRITAIN
For a start, note that Monbiot admits that a gigantic investor in the tar sands is RBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland, a financial monster that arose directly from Thatcher's fanatical liberalisation of the City of London, and was bailed out big-time by Gordon Brown's New Labour government. (Its former CEO has been paid off with a sixteen million-pound pension fund.) So, in effect it is the British government and the City of London banksters that are among the biggest instigators of the tar sands project.
If Canada's CO2 emissions have increased, the UK also has failed to stem its addiction to car use, even though (unlike Canada) it has a relatively dense penetration of rail infrastructure to build on.
"Between 1996 and 2006, car ownership went up by 30% to 29.6m, while the UK population rose by 4%...In the past 20 years a consistently high number of people, 80-90%, have said they would find it very difficult to adapt to not having a car." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8007798.stm)
The UK has failed to conserve its offshore oil, which was only discovered and delivered in the 1960s and 70s. The resource is already approaching depletion. (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=129)
OURSELVES
Furthermore, note that the tar sands pipeline connecting Northern Alberta with the USA, was built under the supervision of the Rt Hon Gary Lunn MP, member for Saanich-GI, who seems to have rigged his election in 2009. (http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=2bca304d-36f2-4bcd-9737-cf04d146443d). There has been a singular absence of public outcry in B.C. about this flagrant apparent abuse of the electoral system, and the RCMP have refused to investigate it with impunity.
But even without electoral corruption, Canada's political system does not offer an alternative to tar sands development, with Ignatieff in 2009 calling the tar sands "Canada's national treasure".
NAFTA plus other semi-secret continental agreements integrate Canada's economy with that of the USA to an even greater extent than other globalised economies. With its culture penetrated (since 1958) by US television propaganda, and its armed forces integrated into NORAD (also since 1958), Canada's independence from the USA is largely a charade conducted by Canada's owning class for its own purposes. This charade includes rigging elections with impunity.
USA
Dealing adequately with the influence of the deranged oil addiction of the USA is obviously beyond these notes. Suffice it to say that the US effectively has no alternative transport to the motor car, and it has the biggest car ownership of any large country, 765 vehicles per 1,000 population (2002 data, UNECE), with light-vehicle sales between 8 and 11 million a year. (http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html) Its client economy in China is rapidly becoming a larger car market than the USA. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100497742)
Developing continental oil resources to reduce dependence on the Middle East has been a top priority in the USA. Since the invasion of Iraq, it has been plain that if Canada attempted to resist development of the tar sands to US requirements, some kind of armed response would be inevitable.
Canada is a client economy of the USA's, and as such has no genuine political choice (nor is one on offer) about developing the tar sands, primarily to serve the USA's rabid oil addiction, but also to serve the USA's client economy in China, where comparable car ownership will require an additional 1,100 million cars.
by George Monbiot
As long as Stephen Harper’s government holds the reigns of power, Canada will remain a global environmental pariah.
The reasons why this is so are not hard to find, but they are seldom analyzed in public discourse on the issue.
To the extent that the Harper government has an economic strategy, beyond letting the marketplace take the country where it will, it is to make Canada an “energy superpower.” That goal, in turn, rests almost entirely on the massive development of the Alberta oil sands to extract oil for export to the United States. Finally, under the terms of NAFTA, the more oil Canada exports to the United States, the more oil it will be required to export in the future. Large scale oil sands development is incompatible with the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. Indeed, Canada is en route to passing the United States as an emitter of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis.
Let’s examine each of the links in this chain of inter-connected realities.
With its close ties to the multinational and national petroleum companies operating in Alberta, the Harper government is dedicated to the proposition that Canada should be a secure base for rising petroleum exports to the United States, in short an “energy superpower.”
Indeed, over the past couple of decades, the American reliance on Canadian oil has grown steadily larger. In July 2006, at 1.6 million barrels a day, Canada was the largest single exporter of crude oil to the United States. Rounding out the top five exporters to the U.S. were Mexico with just over 1.5 million barrels daily, Saudi Arabia at over 1.2 million barrels, Venezuela with nearly 1.2 million barrels, and Nigeria with just over 1.0 million barrels. These five countries were the source of sixty-six per cent of American oil imports. What these totals make clear is the high dependence of the United States on Canada and other Western Hemisphere sources of oil and its relatively low reliance on Middle Eastern sources.
The Harper government’s vision of Canada as a major world petroleum exporter is based on the Alberta oil sands. As oil, national security and the war on terror have become tightly aligned in the thinking of American political leaders, Canada’s largest petroleum deposit, the oil sands, has been ever more closely scrutinized from Washington. Located across an enormous region of north-eastern Alberta---in three major areas spread over 140,800 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of Florida---centred on Fort McMurray about three hundred kilometers north of Edmonton---the oil sands contains almost as much oil as the conventional reserves of Saudi Arabia.
In the early years of this century, oil sands investments totaled nearly $200 billion. By the spring of 2008, oil sands production reached 1.3 million barrels a day, more than half of Canada’s oil production. Ten per cent of North American crude oil production already comes from the oil sands. Incredible as it may seem, the Alberta government produced one scenario that concluded that by 2050, the oil sands could produce eight million barrels of oil a day, transforming Alberta into a North American Saudi Arabia.
The vision of Canada as a vast supplier of petroleum from the oil sands for a thirsty United States is one that promotes dreams of enormous profits in the minds the executives of the petroleum companies and the investors in those companies.
But it is a truly dark vision for the simple reason that the industrial process by which oil is produced from the oil sands results in the release of an enormous volume of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Pursuing the vision commits Alberta, indeed Canada as a whole, to the emission of greenhouse gases on a gargantuan scale, exactly what the earth does not now need. Not only is the production of oil sands oil very expensive, it involves strip mining on a vast scale and the reduction of huge tracts of land to a scarred horror. The production of oil from the oil sands requires enormous inputs of fresh water and natural gas.
The oil sands has become by far the biggest source of greenhouse emissions in Canada. It is no exaggeration to say that without a steep reduction in the production of synthetic crude oil from the oil sands, all other programs in Canada to reduce emissions will be fruitless. Oil sands development has directly shaped the environmental policies of the Harper government.
Let’s look further into this matter of greenhouse gas emissions. The way to do this meaningfully in the lead up to the Copenhagen climate change conference is to tally the metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per country per capita per year. Then we can examine the total emissions of key countries.
Using 2006 figures, the per capita CO2 emissions of the United States were 19.78 metric tons, Canada 18.81, and Australia 20.58. These were the top emitters per capita among the major advanced countries. Further down the list were other major industrialized countries: Japan, 9.78; Germany, 10.40; U.K., 9.66; Italy, 8.05; and France, 6.60. Then we come to the major developing countries: China, 4.58; India, 1.16; Mexico, 4.05; and Brazil, 2.01.
Here are the total emissions of these countries for 2006 in millions of metric tons of CO2: China, 6017.69; United States, 5902.75; India, 1293.17; Japan, 1246.76; Germany, 857.60; Canada, 614.33; United Kingdom, 585.71; Italy, 468.19; Mexico, 435.60; France, 417.75; Australia, 417.06; and Brazil, 377.24.
When we break out the Canadian per capita emissions further, we find that between them Alberta and Saskatchewan (with Saskatchewan higher than Alberta) come in at a staggering 70. The rest of Canada scored 16.
What the figures tell us is that on a per capita basis, developed countries are much more serious emitters of greenhouse gases than are developing countries and that includes the two giants China and India. On the other hand, because of their gigantic populations, China and India are enormous emitters of CO2, respectively ranking number one and number four among the countries of the world.
The nub of the problem is that the developed countries established their high living standards by polluting, on a per capita basis, much more wantonly than the rest of the world. Developing countries are not prepared to allow developed countries to acquire a “grandfather” clause in climate change agreements that would allow them to go on polluting much more per capita than anyone else.
Developed countries, the United States in particular, is determined to be allowed to go on spewing out CO2 emissions, per capita, at a vastly higher rate than China, India or Brazil. The Europeans, who pollute less, are less committed to their right to pollute because they got there first, but they too pollute, per capita much more than China or India.
The Harper government is the worst of the bunch. Our government is determined to insert a rising rate of CO2 emissions right into the heart of our economic strategy. Right now, Canada’s per capita emissions of CO2 are close to five times as high as those of China. The emissions of Alberta and Saskatchewan are fifteen times as high as China’s on a per capita basis.
Any government committed to increasing the production of oil from the oil sands, precisely the position of the Harper government, is dedicated to the proposition that Canada should have the right for decades to come to pollute far more per capita than other countries. On this agenda, Canada will certainly pass the United States, per capita, in greenhouse gas emissions and will likely overtake Australia. Admittedly, it will be as a supplier of dirty oil to the United States that Canada will make itself a “pollution superpower”.
The members of the Harper government did not arrive at their environmental policy, relying on so-called intensity targets, which allow oil sands production to keep on rising as long as emissions-per-barrel go down, for nothing. They did it for the oldest of political reasons. As a government, they are serving the interests of oil companies that have tens of billions of dollars in future profits at stake. It’s as simple as that.
Finally, there’s the matter of NAFTA. Under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada has to continue exporting as much petroleum to the United States as it has been exporting on a rolling average of the previous three years. This means, among other things, that Canada would be required to continue its exports of petroleum to the U.S. even if imports of petroleum to eastern Canada from overseas were cut off as a consequence of a supply crisis generated by falling supplies or a geo-political conflict. This stipulation means that Canada has to make the supplying of the American petroleum market a higher priority than meeting the requirements of Canadian markets experiencing a shortage.
If, as the Harper government fervently wishes, the expansion of oil sands projects dramatically increases Canadian petroleum production, the country’s commitment to export more petroleum to the United States will rise in lock step. The whole point of more oil sands operations is to meet the oil requirements of the U.S.
The plain fact is that when you combine the Harper government’s economic strategy with the stipulations of NAFTA, this country is being locked into rising, not falling, CO2 emissions. Anyone who wants to change the course Canada is on with respect to climate change needs to come to terms with these hard realities. Anything else is nothing more than hot air.
Stephen Harper is going to Copenhagen because the presidents of the United States and China are going. He will be there to try to prevent a binding agreement on greenhouse gas emissions from being achieved. As long as he remains in power, Canada will be a global pariah on the issue of climate change.
rowland morgan wrote:
This article is so awful that I feel an urge to mitigate it with some observations on what has brought Canada to this.
BRITAIN
For a start, note that Monbiot admits that a gigantic investor in the tar sands is RBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland, a financial monster that arose directly from Thatcher's fanatical liberalisation of the City of London, and was bailed out big-time by Gordon Brown's New Labour government. (Its former CEO has been paid off with a sixteen million-pound pension fund.) So, in effect it is the British government and the City of London banksters that are among the biggest instigators of the tar sands project.
If Canada's CO2 emissions have increased, the UK also has failed to stem its addiction to car use, even though (unlike Canada) it has a relatively dense penetration of rail infrastructure to build on.
"Between 1996 and 2006, car ownership went up by 30% to 29.6m, while the UK population rose by 4%...In the past 20 years a consistently high number of people, 80-90%, have said they would find it very difficult to adapt to not having a car." (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8007798.stm)
The UK has failed to conserve its offshore oil, which was only discovered and delivered in the 1960s and 70s. The resource is already approaching depletion. (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=129)
OURSELVES
Furthermore, note that the tar sands pipeline connecting Northern Alberta with the USA, was built under the supervision of the Rt Hon Gary Lunn MP, member for Saanich-GI, who seems to have rigged his election in 2009. (http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=2bca304d-36f2-4bcd-9737-cf04d146443d). There has been a singular absence of public outcry in B.C. about this flagrant apparent abuse of the electoral system, and the RCMP have refused to investigate it with impunity.
But even without electoral corruption, Canada's political system does not offer an alternative to tar sands development, with Ignatieff in 2009 calling the tar sands "Canada's national treasure".
NAFTA plus other semi-secret continental agreements integrate Canada's economy with that of the USA to an even greater extent than other globalised economies. With its culture penetrated (since 1958) by US television propaganda, and its armed forces integrated into NORAD (also since 1958), Canada's independence from the USA is largely a charade conducted by Canada's owning class for its own purposes. This charade includes rigging elections with impunity.
USA
Dealing adequately with the influence of the deranged oil addiction of the USA is obviously beyond these notes. Suffice it to say that the US effectively has no alternative transport to the motor car, and it has the biggest car ownership of any large country, 765 vehicles per 1,000 population (2002 data, UNECE), with light-vehicle sales between 8 and 11 million a year. (http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html) Its client economy in China is rapidly becoming a larger car market than the USA. (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100497742)
Developing continental oil resources to reduce dependence on the Middle East has been a top priority in the USA. Since the invasion of Iraq, it has been plain that if Canada attempted to resist development of the tar sands to US requirements, some kind of armed response would be inevitable.
Canada is a client economy of the USA's, and as such has no genuine political choice (nor is one on offer) about developing the tar sands, primarily to serve the USA's rabid oil addiction, but also to serve the USA's client economy in China, where comparable car ownership will require an additional 1,100 million cars.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Bear Mountain Developer Len Barrie Subject to Tax Investigation
Lightning co-owner subject to probe
by David Shoalts
Canada Revenue Agency looking into handling of finances at Len Barrie’s Victoria development
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/lightning-co-owner-subject-to-probe/article1376388/
TAMPA — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 10:10PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2009 9:46PM EST
Len Barrie is still listed in the Tampa Bay Lightning’s media guide as a co-owner of the NHL team, but those close to the team say he is out of the picture.
His financial problems with the Bear Mountain golf resort and housing development near Victoria were severe enough to scuttle his attempt to buy out fellow owner Oren Koules in late summer. Now it appears as if the problems will worsen.
In the wake of a damning report by the company’s former auditor that accused management at Bear Mountain of misappropriating funds, a source said Canada Revenue Agency is looking into the development’s finances.
Barrie, who was accused in the report and by a member of the development’s executive committee of improperly financing at least part of his share of the Lightning with Bear Mountain funds, did not respond to a request for comment.
Bear Mountain is limping along with some housing sales, although at least one condominium project was halted and a large financing deal has not materialized. Barrie had said an agreement with Siraj Capital, a company based in Dubai, was to inject $350-million (all currency U.S.) into the development by October, but it has not come to fruition.
Barrie had tried to get Anthony Sansone Jr., a St. Louis real-estate developer, to be his partner in buying out Koules. But that, too, did not pan out and Barrie informed NHL commissioner Gary Bettman he was pulling out of the process.
Sansone has told the local media in Tampa he is still interested in the team. How that will work out with Koules remains to be seen.
Bettman orchestrated the buyout plan after Koules and Barrie told the commissioner last June their relationship deteriorated so badly it could not be repaired. The commissioner came up with a sort of double-barrelled shotgun buyout that gave Barrie the first shot. He was given until late September to try to buy out Koules. If he failed, Koules was to get until Nov. 23 to complete his own buyout.
Koules tried to make a deal with Miami real-estate mogul Jeff Greene, but he declined. Koules has also explored going it alone with the support of the Lightning’s former owner, Palace Sports and Entertainment, which has about $100-million in loans tied up in the franchise.
People close to the Lightning think Barrie may resurface looking for some cash if Koules completes a buyout. However, there will be a lineup of creditors, including a large group of current and former NHL players who invested in Bear Mountain, eager to part the cash from Barrie.
All is quiet on the buyout front, although that does not seem to bother Bettman. He told reporters recently that Koules is no longer subject to a deadline and he is satisfied with the team’s situation.
On the ice, the Lightning’s record is up from last season, but ticket sales are down. However, the team is still bumping along and paying its bills, which keeps it from being one of Bettman’s bigger headaches. For now.
“We’re seeing our way through the darkest period,” said Koules, who moved to Tampa this year to take charge of an operation stripped down to save on expenses. He is running the business operations of the Lightning, serving as governor, president and man in charge of everything outside the purview of general manager Brian Lawton, who looks after the hockey side of things.
Even though the Lightning have stayed in playoff contention this season, holding eighth place in the Eastern Conference with a 9-5-7 record, attendance is down at St. Pete Times Forum from last season’s disastrous campaign in which the Bolts finished second last overall. After nine home games this season, the average crowd is 14,605, down almost 1,900 from last season and 24th among the NHL’s 30 teams.
Koules is getting by because the Lightning qualified for a $15-million revenue-sharing payment this year. An NHL source said the team is meeting its obligations and the league has been assured it will continue to do so. But unless ticket sales increase dramatically, he is going to need an investor at some point.
On the plus side, Koules said sponsorship sales are up from last season. He would not give a revenue number but said sales have exceeded last season’s totals by 10 per cent.
“It’s a different world down here,” Koules said, and then invoked his team’s next opponent, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who pay a visit tonight. “It’s not like you can open the door and you haven’t won in 37 years or whatever and still sell out.”
On the ice, things are similarly good and bad. Thanks in part to the development of centre Steve Stamkos, the No. 1 overall draft pick from two years ago, who has 15 goals in 21 games, and this year’s No. 2 overall pick, defenceman Victor Hedman, the Lightning are staying in the playoff picture despite the indifferent play of star Vincent Lecavalier. His future with the team remains the subject of speculation.
So does the Lightning’s ability to survive without the arrival of a major investor. A source in the banking community said Koules is keeping his bankers satisfied, but if he is using his own money to keep the team going, sooner or later he will need a partner or two.
by David Shoalts
Canada Revenue Agency looking into handling of finances at Len Barrie’s Victoria development
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/lightning-co-owner-subject-to-probe/article1376388/
TAMPA — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009 10:10PM EST Last updated on Thursday, Nov. 26, 2009 9:46PM EST
Len Barrie is still listed in the Tampa Bay Lightning’s media guide as a co-owner of the NHL team, but those close to the team say he is out of the picture.
His financial problems with the Bear Mountain golf resort and housing development near Victoria were severe enough to scuttle his attempt to buy out fellow owner Oren Koules in late summer. Now it appears as if the problems will worsen.
In the wake of a damning report by the company’s former auditor that accused management at Bear Mountain of misappropriating funds, a source said Canada Revenue Agency is looking into the development’s finances.
Barrie, who was accused in the report and by a member of the development’s executive committee of improperly financing at least part of his share of the Lightning with Bear Mountain funds, did not respond to a request for comment.
Bear Mountain is limping along with some housing sales, although at least one condominium project was halted and a large financing deal has not materialized. Barrie had said an agreement with Siraj Capital, a company based in Dubai, was to inject $350-million (all currency U.S.) into the development by October, but it has not come to fruition.
Barrie had tried to get Anthony Sansone Jr., a St. Louis real-estate developer, to be his partner in buying out Koules. But that, too, did not pan out and Barrie informed NHL commissioner Gary Bettman he was pulling out of the process.
Sansone has told the local media in Tampa he is still interested in the team. How that will work out with Koules remains to be seen.
Bettman orchestrated the buyout plan after Koules and Barrie told the commissioner last June their relationship deteriorated so badly it could not be repaired. The commissioner came up with a sort of double-barrelled shotgun buyout that gave Barrie the first shot. He was given until late September to try to buy out Koules. If he failed, Koules was to get until Nov. 23 to complete his own buyout.
Koules tried to make a deal with Miami real-estate mogul Jeff Greene, but he declined. Koules has also explored going it alone with the support of the Lightning’s former owner, Palace Sports and Entertainment, which has about $100-million in loans tied up in the franchise.
People close to the Lightning think Barrie may resurface looking for some cash if Koules completes a buyout. However, there will be a lineup of creditors, including a large group of current and former NHL players who invested in Bear Mountain, eager to part the cash from Barrie.
All is quiet on the buyout front, although that does not seem to bother Bettman. He told reporters recently that Koules is no longer subject to a deadline and he is satisfied with the team’s situation.
On the ice, the Lightning’s record is up from last season, but ticket sales are down. However, the team is still bumping along and paying its bills, which keeps it from being one of Bettman’s bigger headaches. For now.
“We’re seeing our way through the darkest period,” said Koules, who moved to Tampa this year to take charge of an operation stripped down to save on expenses. He is running the business operations of the Lightning, serving as governor, president and man in charge of everything outside the purview of general manager Brian Lawton, who looks after the hockey side of things.
Even though the Lightning have stayed in playoff contention this season, holding eighth place in the Eastern Conference with a 9-5-7 record, attendance is down at St. Pete Times Forum from last season’s disastrous campaign in which the Bolts finished second last overall. After nine home games this season, the average crowd is 14,605, down almost 1,900 from last season and 24th among the NHL’s 30 teams.
Koules is getting by because the Lightning qualified for a $15-million revenue-sharing payment this year. An NHL source said the team is meeting its obligations and the league has been assured it will continue to do so. But unless ticket sales increase dramatically, he is going to need an investor at some point.
On the plus side, Koules said sponsorship sales are up from last season. He would not give a revenue number but said sales have exceeded last season’s totals by 10 per cent.
“It’s a different world down here,” Koules said, and then invoked his team’s next opponent, the Toronto Maple Leafs, who pay a visit tonight. “It’s not like you can open the door and you haven’t won in 37 years or whatever and still sell out.”
On the ice, things are similarly good and bad. Thanks in part to the development of centre Steve Stamkos, the No. 1 overall draft pick from two years ago, who has 15 goals in 21 games, and this year’s No. 2 overall pick, defenceman Victor Hedman, the Lightning are staying in the playoff picture despite the indifferent play of star Vincent Lecavalier. His future with the team remains the subject of speculation.
So does the Lightning’s ability to survive without the arrival of a major investor. A source in the banking community said Koules is keeping his bankers satisfied, but if he is using his own money to keep the team going, sooner or later he will need a partner or two.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Steal (er...aggregate) This Article
A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That 'Steal' Content
from the who-ya-gonna-block-now,-rupert? dept
As Rupert Murdoch talks about how he wants to cut off Google, while claiming that aggregator sites are "parasites" and "stealing" from him -- and that fair use would likely be barred by the courts, it seemed like a good time to examine at least some of the sites that are owned by Rupert Murdoch that appear to aggregate content from other sites and which rely on the very same fair use argument. We've mentioned a few in the past, but figured it wouldn't hurt to explore them more thoroughly.
Well, let's start with the flagship Wall Street Journal itself. It integrates its own "aggregator" with headlines and links to other stories. For example, on the WSJ's tech news page if you scroll down, you'll find a bunch of headlines and links to other sources -- without permission:
Oops. Looks like the WSJ is "parasiting" and "stealing" according to Murdoch. Perhaps he should cut them of too.
Okay, how about Fox News itself? Yup. It's got an aggregator as well. Here's its Politics Buzztracker that aggregates and links to stories from a variety of different publications, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others:
Murdoch can't be too happy about all that thieving.
Then we've got the folks over at AllThingsD, who I actually think do excellent work, and who have built up a nice part of their site called "Voices." I actually quite like this and find it useful (and yes, every so often, they are kind enough to "parasite" one of my posts). In fact, it helps keep AllThingsD in my RSS reader because it's so useful. But, damn, if that doesn't look just like what Murdoch is complaining about. Not only does it have headlines, but also a fair bit of intro text (no summary, no commentary) and even the links are hidden at the bottom, rather than using the headlines as links:
Of course, it's not just with news either. The folks at AlarmClock remind us that Murdoch's News Corp. owns IGN, which has a variety of properties, including the ever popular RottenTomatoes movie review aggregation site. Yes, the entire site is based on "parasiting" (according to Murdoch) movie reviews off of every other site, and pulling them all together:
Good thing Murdoch is planning on working on ways to get the court to ban that sort of "fair use."
Some other IGN sites don't quite have aggregators, but I do find it interesting that they've integrated in Google search, such that you could do searches for things across the web and have them remain in a totally News Corp./IGN-branded experience. Effectively, on these pages, Murdoch's own properties are able to "parasite" back Google's own "parasite" engine. Here are two examples:
I'm sure there are probably more examples of various News Corp. properties regularly doing exactly what Murdoch and other News Corp. execs are now decrying as illegal and which must be stopped. So, it has to be asked, Mr. Murdoch, will you pull down all of these sites?
from the who-ya-gonna-block-now,-rupert? dept
As Rupert Murdoch talks about how he wants to cut off Google, while claiming that aggregator sites are "parasites" and "stealing" from him -- and that fair use would likely be barred by the courts, it seemed like a good time to examine at least some of the sites that are owned by Rupert Murdoch that appear to aggregate content from other sites and which rely on the very same fair use argument. We've mentioned a few in the past, but figured it wouldn't hurt to explore them more thoroughly.
Well, let's start with the flagship Wall Street Journal itself. It integrates its own "aggregator" with headlines and links to other stories. For example, on the WSJ's tech news page if you scroll down, you'll find a bunch of headlines and links to other sources -- without permission:
Oops. Looks like the WSJ is "parasiting" and "stealing" according to Murdoch. Perhaps he should cut them of too.
Okay, how about Fox News itself? Yup. It's got an aggregator as well. Here's its Politics Buzztracker that aggregates and links to stories from a variety of different publications, including the NY Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and others:
Murdoch can't be too happy about all that thieving.
Then we've got the folks over at AllThingsD, who I actually think do excellent work, and who have built up a nice part of their site called "Voices." I actually quite like this and find it useful (and yes, every so often, they are kind enough to "parasite" one of my posts). In fact, it helps keep AllThingsD in my RSS reader because it's so useful. But, damn, if that doesn't look just like what Murdoch is complaining about. Not only does it have headlines, but also a fair bit of intro text (no summary, no commentary) and even the links are hidden at the bottom, rather than using the headlines as links:
Of course, it's not just with news either. The folks at AlarmClock remind us that Murdoch's News Corp. owns IGN, which has a variety of properties, including the ever popular RottenTomatoes movie review aggregation site. Yes, the entire site is based on "parasiting" (according to Murdoch) movie reviews off of every other site, and pulling them all together:
Good thing Murdoch is planning on working on ways to get the court to ban that sort of "fair use."
Some other IGN sites don't quite have aggregators, but I do find it interesting that they've integrated in Google search, such that you could do searches for things across the web and have them remain in a totally News Corp./IGN-branded experience. Effectively, on these pages, Murdoch's own properties are able to "parasite" back Google's own "parasite" engine. Here are two examples:
I'm sure there are probably more examples of various News Corp. properties regularly doing exactly what Murdoch and other News Corp. execs are now decrying as illegal and which must be stopped. So, it has to be asked, Mr. Murdoch, will you pull down all of these sites?
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
NATO Storms Red Crescent Compound in Aghanistan
Afghan Red Crescent angry after NATO-led forces storm compound
Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:01pm IST
By Nita Bhalla
source
NEW DELHI (Reuters AlertNet) - The Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) expressed anger on Tuesday at NATO-led troops who used explosives to storm a Red Crescent compound and temporarily detain two aid workers.
Saleem Wardak, manager of the media division of the ARCS, said NATO-led forces attacked their office in Qalat in the southern province of Zabul during a military operation against Taliban insurgents on Friday night.
"There was an attack by the security forces and two staff members were arrested, but were released after 24 hours," Wardak told AlertNet by telephone.
He said security forces used explosives to break into the compound with the blasts shattering windows and breaking doors.
"It is the first time that the ARCS has been attacked like this and we are very angry about it as we are only here to help the people and what the security forces have done is illegal," Wardak said.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it had been looking for a Taliban contact responsible for funding militant activities and transporting improvised explosive device materials and weapons into the area.
"He was discovered hiding in a building later discovered to be a Red Cross office on the compound. Further questioning of the Taliban facilitator revealed he is a relative of a local Red Cross worker," said an ISAF statement issued on Saturday.
ISAF said one militant was killed during the operation.
However, unconfirmed reports suggested the dead man was an Afghan policeman.
Since U.S.-backed Afghan forces ended the five-year rule of the Islamist Taliban regime in 2001, hundreds of aid agencies have deployed to help respond to the needs of millions of people in a country crippled by a quarter-century of violence.
ATTACKS FROM BOTH SIDES
But attacks by militants persist, hampering relief and reconstruction work in much of the country. Aid workers are increasingly at risk of being targeted for kidnappings and killings from Taliban insurgents, as well being caught up in military operations against the Taliban.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan reported that on Sept.2, security personnel forcefully entered a hospital in Wardekprovince, where they broke equipment, tied up employees and forced staff and patients from their beds during an operation.
In August, Afghanistan's health ministry said a clinic in Paktika province was attacked by NATO-led forces, who believed members of the Taliban were there seeking medical assistance.
Phillip Charlesworth, head of delegation for the International Committee for Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Afghanistan, said he was concerned about the way ISAF was conducting its operations.
"The way the security forces conducted this operation in Qalat was unfortunate, and there were probably other options that they could have been pursued instead of launching an attack on the compound," said Charlesworth.
"I think its always a concern when organisations like ours get caught up in military operations and it is an issue about respecting our humanitarian space."
Attacks on aid workers by militants are also on the rise.
On Oct. 28, six U.N. staff were killed when Taliban militants attacked a guesthouse in Kabul. It was the second attack against the United Nations in Afghanistan this year and prompted the world body to temporarily relocate 600 expat staff.
Aid agencies are revising their security arrangements in the wake of the attack.
But many aid workers say their work is unsustainable in this increasingly insecure environment.
"I don't know what is going to happen, but we are now beginning to wonder how long we can realistically stay here in Afghanistan," said one aid worker, who did not want to be named.
Wed Nov 11, 2009 5:01pm IST
By Nita Bhalla
source
NEW DELHI (Reuters AlertNet) - The Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) expressed anger on Tuesday at NATO-led troops who used explosives to storm a Red Crescent compound and temporarily detain two aid workers.
Saleem Wardak, manager of the media division of the ARCS, said NATO-led forces attacked their office in Qalat in the southern province of Zabul during a military operation against Taliban insurgents on Friday night.
"There was an attack by the security forces and two staff members were arrested, but were released after 24 hours," Wardak told AlertNet by telephone.
He said security forces used explosives to break into the compound with the blasts shattering windows and breaking doors.
"It is the first time that the ARCS has been attacked like this and we are very angry about it as we are only here to help the people and what the security forces have done is illegal," Wardak said.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said it had been looking for a Taliban contact responsible for funding militant activities and transporting improvised explosive device materials and weapons into the area.
"He was discovered hiding in a building later discovered to be a Red Cross office on the compound. Further questioning of the Taliban facilitator revealed he is a relative of a local Red Cross worker," said an ISAF statement issued on Saturday.
ISAF said one militant was killed during the operation.
However, unconfirmed reports suggested the dead man was an Afghan policeman.
Since U.S.-backed Afghan forces ended the five-year rule of the Islamist Taliban regime in 2001, hundreds of aid agencies have deployed to help respond to the needs of millions of people in a country crippled by a quarter-century of violence.
ATTACKS FROM BOTH SIDES
But attacks by militants persist, hampering relief and reconstruction work in much of the country. Aid workers are increasingly at risk of being targeted for kidnappings and killings from Taliban insurgents, as well being caught up in military operations against the Taliban.
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan reported that on Sept.2, security personnel forcefully entered a hospital in Wardekprovince, where they broke equipment, tied up employees and forced staff and patients from their beds during an operation.
In August, Afghanistan's health ministry said a clinic in Paktika province was attacked by NATO-led forces, who believed members of the Taliban were there seeking medical assistance.
Phillip Charlesworth, head of delegation for the International Committee for Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Afghanistan, said he was concerned about the way ISAF was conducting its operations.
"The way the security forces conducted this operation in Qalat was unfortunate, and there were probably other options that they could have been pursued instead of launching an attack on the compound," said Charlesworth.
"I think its always a concern when organisations like ours get caught up in military operations and it is an issue about respecting our humanitarian space."
Attacks on aid workers by militants are also on the rise.
On Oct. 28, six U.N. staff were killed when Taliban militants attacked a guesthouse in Kabul. It was the second attack against the United Nations in Afghanistan this year and prompted the world body to temporarily relocate 600 expat staff.
Aid agencies are revising their security arrangements in the wake of the attack.
But many aid workers say their work is unsustainable in this increasingly insecure environment.
"I don't know what is going to happen, but we are now beginning to wonder how long we can realistically stay here in Afghanistan," said one aid worker, who did not want to be named.
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Rupert Murdoch's Plans for Net News Control
Murdoch's plan for web pay walls 'raises questions of anti-trust law'
source
Talks with other publishers to introduce charging on news websites will undoubtedly attract the attention of competition authorities, warns UK expert
Murdoch admits delay in introducing newspaper website charges
Matt Wells: A desperate measure for desperate times
Murdoch: pay walls a "work in progress". Photograph: Saul Loeb/Getty Images
Questions over competition in the media industry have been raised by Rupert Murdoch's admission that News Corporation is talking to other organisations about its plans to introduce web charging.
Murdoch this week admitted that it is proving harder than expected to introduce charges for readers browsing his newspaper websites and that News Corp may miss a target of next June for the introduction of so-called "pay walls" at papers including the Sun, the Times, the New York Post and the Australian.
The initiative, which has divided the industry, is an attempt to recalibrate the business model for struggling print media businesses.
Three months ago, Murdoch announced that he intended to introduce website charges by the end of News Corporation's financial year, which runs to June 2010. Some rivals, including the New York Times, are planning similar moves.
He declined to comment on the reasons for any delay except to indicate that he was talking to rival publishers, including the Telegraph group in Britain. "It's a work in progress and there's a huge amount of work going on," Murdoch said.
But Murdoch's discussions could breach UK anti-trust regulations, according to a competition law specialist. Alan Davis of legal firm Pinsent Masons warned that if the conversations went as far as talking about pricing, then regulators would almost certainly get involved.
"Competitors should not be discussing business strategy for charging for online content and should certainly not be discussing pricing," he said. "Be under no doubt the competition authorities would be interested about why, and what, conversations are taking place. It is the nature of regulators to be suspicious."
However, Davis said that without knowing the exact nature of the conversations between News Corporation and the Telegraph, it was difficult to point to specific regulatory issues.
Anti-Olympic protesters blamed for virulent outbreak of media fever, diarrhea
Anti-Olympic protesters blamed for virulent outbreak of fever, diarrhea
Yesterday at 10:29pm
Cantrest News Service
November 9, 2009
MLA Harry Bloy, reportedly recovering after bout with anti-anti-Olympics flu
Anti-Olympic Torch marchers and their demands for indigenous rights, social justice, and free speech caused last week's epidemic of "spastic delirium" and "verbal diarrhea" in BC news offices, production studios and even the Legislature, reports say.
Toxic rhetoric began fouling newsrooms across Victoria last Saturday after No 2010 Victoria's successful rally and march that disrupted the Torch Relay and its one-day celebration that cost taxpayers an estimated half a million dollars.
The disease - known as "anti-anti-Olympic fever" - first felled CHEK News producer Kristin Robinson, then struck Times Colonist reporter Joanne Hatherly with a vengeance.
"She flatlined, basically," said a source close to the paper. "Her brain completely shut down."
Lucinda Chodan, Times Colonist editor-in-chief, disputed the reports.
"You're making a big assumption, that Hatherly even has a brain in the first place," she said, before refusing further comment.
Burnaby-Lougheed MLA Harry Bloy's attack of verbal diarrhea in the BC Legislature on Wednesday drew disgusted reactions from across the region.
"Yes, we've had lots of messages, dozens," said a constituency assistant at Bloy's office. "Harry is resting now and we hope he recovers."
Jody Patterson was the first Vancouver Sun journalist to fall victim to the fast-moving plague, which causes lapses in judgment, ethical breaches, and loss of cognitive function.
Most affected were the Sun's editorial staff, who spewed bile and vitriol of a particularly vile nature in Friday's edition, shocking thousands of readers.
"It's the readers who suffer most," said a source close to the Sun.
"It's traumatic to see once-respected news sources humiliate themselves like this. They attack people in public, foam at the mouth, piss themselves, and shriek like banshees. It's just horrific."
Experts say this new "anti-anti-Olympic fever" typically only lasts one to two days. But Robinson and other CHEK staffers were gripped by the malady for four full days, raising concerns that a longer-lasting, more virulent mutation is possible.
The epidemic is expected to peak in February of 2010 and will likely leave many major news agencies reeling from a loss of credibility, reports say.
The contagion may be a result of over-reliance on authority figures and over-exposure to corporate hype. Those affected suffer a severe form of cognitive dissonance when confronted with people protesting against the corporate agenda and in favour of civil liberties and indigenous rights.
News desks and opinion pages are equally vulnerable to the subsequent eruptions of toxic language and verbal excreta, which can infect anyone who comes into contact with them.
Doctors warn that while the epidemic continues, news from media conglomerates - especially corporate Olympic sponsors -- should be taken with a grain of salt. Citizens are urged to wash their hands and dose themselves with independent media sources like B Channel, subMedia, Victoria Indymedia, and No2010.com
Yesterday at 10:29pm
Cantrest News Service
November 9, 2009
MLA Harry Bloy, reportedly recovering after bout with anti-anti-Olympics flu
Anti-Olympic Torch marchers and their demands for indigenous rights, social justice, and free speech caused last week's epidemic of "spastic delirium" and "verbal diarrhea" in BC news offices, production studios and even the Legislature, reports say.
Toxic rhetoric began fouling newsrooms across Victoria last Saturday after No 2010 Victoria's successful rally and march that disrupted the Torch Relay and its one-day celebration that cost taxpayers an estimated half a million dollars.
The disease - known as "anti-anti-Olympic fever" - first felled CHEK News producer Kristin Robinson, then struck Times Colonist reporter Joanne Hatherly with a vengeance.
"She flatlined, basically," said a source close to the paper. "Her brain completely shut down."
Lucinda Chodan, Times Colonist editor-in-chief, disputed the reports.
"You're making a big assumption, that Hatherly even has a brain in the first place," she said, before refusing further comment.
Burnaby-Lougheed MLA Harry Bloy's attack of verbal diarrhea in the BC Legislature on Wednesday drew disgusted reactions from across the region.
"Yes, we've had lots of messages, dozens," said a constituency assistant at Bloy's office. "Harry is resting now and we hope he recovers."
Jody Patterson was the first Vancouver Sun journalist to fall victim to the fast-moving plague, which causes lapses in judgment, ethical breaches, and loss of cognitive function.
Most affected were the Sun's editorial staff, who spewed bile and vitriol of a particularly vile nature in Friday's edition, shocking thousands of readers.
"It's the readers who suffer most," said a source close to the Sun.
"It's traumatic to see once-respected news sources humiliate themselves like this. They attack people in public, foam at the mouth, piss themselves, and shriek like banshees. It's just horrific."
Experts say this new "anti-anti-Olympic fever" typically only lasts one to two days. But Robinson and other CHEK staffers were gripped by the malady for four full days, raising concerns that a longer-lasting, more virulent mutation is possible.
The epidemic is expected to peak in February of 2010 and will likely leave many major news agencies reeling from a loss of credibility, reports say.
The contagion may be a result of over-reliance on authority figures and over-exposure to corporate hype. Those affected suffer a severe form of cognitive dissonance when confronted with people protesting against the corporate agenda and in favour of civil liberties and indigenous rights.
News desks and opinion pages are equally vulnerable to the subsequent eruptions of toxic language and verbal excreta, which can infect anyone who comes into contact with them.
Doctors warn that while the epidemic continues, news from media conglomerates - especially corporate Olympic sponsors -- should be taken with a grain of salt. Citizens are urged to wash their hands and dose themselves with independent media sources like B Channel, subMedia, Victoria Indymedia, and No2010.com
Friday, November 06, 2009
Google Eyes Future of News Delivery
How news will change in Google's eyes
Google's Eric Schmidt gives eight ideas on the future of journalism
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on where journalism is heading
When Google's CEO Eric Schmidt sat down on Thursday evening at the MIT in Boston, one topic that came up in the discussion with the audience was the future of news. As was reported by several journalists, Schmidt appeared to have a lot sympathy for newspapers and magazines and, well, interest. This might be no surprise, since delivering the news in the future seems to be an issue that Google is brainstorming about.
Their interest in news grew from a nice small idea that Krishna Bharat had about story ranking in 2001 to something which obviously keeps its CEO busy as it became a part of their future business. Indeed, Schmidt talked of "about 10 news stream ideas" they have for the future of news. What could they be?
To answer that, we need to understand fundamentally how Google addresses the issue, which is very much in a technology-driven way. As Schmidt joked at the Gartner Symposium, that in order to study the consumption of information in the future, you should find an early technology adopter, hence a teenager in your house, or borrow one, if you don't have one. So how can news be consumed in the future? The points Schmidt comes up with are convincing, although not totally new.
Always online: "...the reading will presumably be online not offline, just because of the scale of it."
Mobile: "The Kindle is a proto of what this thing could look like. People will carry these things around."
On a smallish display: "...probably on a tablet or a mobile phone"
Personalised: "It'll be highly personalised, right? So you'll know who the person is."
Semantic: "capable of deeper navigation into a subject"
Cross-financed: "It'll be advertising-supported and subscription-supported, so you'll probably have a mixture."
While we have heard of most of these ideas, there are two aspects which seemed to be new and less decrepit: integrated storytelling and differentiated news display.
"There'll be a lot of integration of media – so video, voice, what have you," said Schmidt rather briefly, but indeed, integrated storytelling might be the next step after the convergence of television, radio and newspapers. Since the way we told a news story has changed in the past, it is quite certain that it will change in the future as well.
While now we display text, video and audio next to each other there might be a future where the stories are told in a new medium that emerges out of a deep convergence of these three. Indeed, the development of integrated formats might change journalism fundamentally in terms of how to set out the line of a story, what to begin with and where to end, or how to provide additional information. The ways video games structure stories might give us a slight hint what could lay in front of us.
"...show me the differential. Since you know what you told me yesterday, just tell me what changed today. Don't repeat everything." What Schmidt is talking about here is a rather useful feature in a world of information overload. Indeed, every news site should have a button to mark articles as read or seen. Think of something like the "I like" button on Facebook, which would send an article to be stored in your personal archive.
In addition, the unsatisfied experience you make today when reading a news website could vanish by this feature. A list of looked at articles gives you a feeling that you have actually done something while now the only feeling that is left after scanning a website is that there is soo much more which you missed.
Of course, a flipped-through magazine or newspapers already gives you that satiesfied "been there, seen that" feeling today. Sometimes the future lies in the past.
(Via NiemanLab.)
Monday, November 02, 2009
No2010 Victoria calls event "a victory for rights and justice"
Anti-Olympic Festival and March disrupt Torch Relay send-off in Victoria:
No2010 Victoria calls event "a victory for rights and justice"
Victoria, Coast Salish Territories, November 1, 2009 - Over 400 people gathered to oppose the 2010 Olympic Torch Relay in Victoria on Friday, October 30th at an "Anti-Olympics Festival" and "Zombie March" organized by No2010 Victoria. The march succeeded in disrupting the relay, and security personnel were forced to extinguish the torch, load it in a van, and reroute it in order to reach the Legislature.
"Our events were a victory for rights and justice," said No2010 spokesperson Zoe Blunt. "We took a strong strand on respecting indigenous rights to land, defending civil rights, and ending poverty, and people across the country are thanking us for our dedication."
The day of action against Torch Relay celebrations began with a "Five Ring Circus" featuring speakers, performance art, puppets and satirical competitions such as the "Binners' Olympics," the "Tour de Misplaced Finance" and "Queer Wrestling."
"It was a lot of fun!" said Bitey the Bed Bug, one of the anti-Olympics mascots.
Later in the afternoon, a "Zombie March" replete with stilt walkers, a marching band and a giant "Ghost Salmon" puppet wove through city streets and blocked a major intersection outside an RBC bank for over 30 minutes. RBC is one of the Vancouver Winter Olympics' most important sponsors and a major investor in the tar sands, the most environmentally destructive project in Canada.
"We wanted to expose the empty rhetoric of a Green Games," said No2010 organizer Kim Croswell. "Parading a giant Ghost Salmon was our way of pointing out how wrong-headed government priorities are in the midst of global warming and the collapse of salmon runs on the West Coast."
Continuing along the relay route, hundreds of marchers braving rain and cold weather cheered loudly when it was announced that the Torch had been diverted in order avoid the procession. Marchers ended at the site of the corporate-sponsored Torch Relay Celebration, where they infiltrated the crowd chanting "No Olympics on Stolen Native Land" and "Homes Before Games."
"Disrupting the Torch sends a strong message that blowing $6 billion on a sports extravaganza is far from popular," said No2010 Victoria spokesperson Tamara Herman. "The people profiting from the Olympics are not the people most affected by cuts to sectors such as welfare, affordable housing, harm reduction, health care, education, the arts and-ironically-amateur sports."
"The day of action was a day of solidarity uniting a broach spectrum of people," added No2010 spokesperson Danielle Hagel. "It sent a strong message that the Olympic Torch Relay will face opposition right across the country."
"This action demonstrates how effective we can be when we act together, even in the face of police aggression and unwarranted surveillance", said Blunt. "The group was strong, and showed remarkable self-control and commitment to the cause. We want to congratulate everyone who joined in."
Sunday, October 25, 2009
A Few Choice Words on the CPP IB
Notes for an Ape Interview
by Erik Andersen
A matter of "first Principles". The design of the CPP Investment Plan makes it impossible for the investment managers to comply with a cardinal rule for regular investment advisors; the "Know your client rule".
Given this non-compliance condition, making investments at the CPP IB should not include the use of public or private common shares or any other form of private investment.
The avoidance of conflict of interest situations should not be entertained if for no other reason than it has very bad optics. The temptation to "socialize" private sector losses, or as I call it, going to the CPP Fund as "investor of last resort", is too great for even the saintly to resist.
It was and is my hope that the Minister of Finance will soon accept my characterization of the dangers in the investment design they are presently using. So far the very few replies I have were mostly relying upon the Chief Actuary's report indicating the Fund was sound for at least 75 years. I have raised the issue of the now-invalid assumptions used by the Actuary and have had only deafening silence.
Several examples of investments that bear out my concerns and illustrate why I think the CPP Fund is in harms way. Extending this criticism to other pension funds is equally valid as they all "eat from the same bowl", one provided by the international banking community.
by Erik Andersen
A matter of "first Principles". The design of the CPP Investment Plan makes it impossible for the investment managers to comply with a cardinal rule for regular investment advisors; the "Know your client rule".
Given this non-compliance condition, making investments at the CPP IB should not include the use of public or private common shares or any other form of private investment.
The avoidance of conflict of interest situations should not be entertained if for no other reason than it has very bad optics. The temptation to "socialize" private sector losses, or as I call it, going to the CPP Fund as "investor of last resort", is too great for even the saintly to resist.
It was and is my hope that the Minister of Finance will soon accept my characterization of the dangers in the investment design they are presently using. So far the very few replies I have were mostly relying upon the Chief Actuary's report indicating the Fund was sound for at least 75 years. I have raised the issue of the now-invalid assumptions used by the Actuary and have had only deafening silence.
Several examples of investments that bear out my concerns and illustrate why I think the CPP Fund is in harms way. Extending this criticism to other pension funds is equally valid as they all "eat from the same bowl", one provided by the international banking community.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Emerging Investigative News Networks
An Emerging Investigative News Network
BY CHARLES LEWIS
http://www.investigativereportingworkshop.org/ilab/investigative_news_network/
June 29, 2009
According to a May 2009 report written by Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (“New Media Makers ”), “since 2005, 180 foundations, large and small, have contributed nearly $128 million to U.S. news and information projects.” And that excludes the substantial funding given annually to public broadcasting.
These surprising numbers reflect the precise extent of the philanthropic response to the current crisis in journalism and the widening perception that America faces a larger, civic crisis as well, for local communities and for the nation. For without information, without an informed citizenry, how can citizens hold their elected officials accountable in a representative democracy?
Roughly half of that philanthropic support has gone to support investigative journalism, and more than $56 million went to three nonprofit organizations: the Center for Investigative Reporting, begun in 1977, the Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, and ProPublica, which started in 2008. But more broadly, and in direct response to the commercial news media meltdown, something historically stunning has been occurring – nonprofit investigative reporting centers are proliferating throughout the nation, a new entrepreneurialism brought about largely by the diaspora of working journalists simply searching for a hospitable milieu in which to do their important work.
Increasingly, the most ambitious reporting projects will emanate from the public realm, not from private, commercial outlets. And if present trends continue, which appears likely, by 2010 the amount of nonprofit journalism funding annually supporting “public service journalism” via these centers may rival and possibly even exceed what America’s newspapers spent on investigative reporting “I-teams” in the apogee of print journalism. And that is a historically significant, tectonic shift in the working dynamics of investigative reporting in the United States.
Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, recently initiated unprecedented conversations about the growing need for collaboration among the nonprofit investigative centers. These efforts were applauded by the Columbia Journalism Review (“All Together Now,” May/June 2009): “Collaboration needs to become central to journalism’s mission – and the mainstream press needs to get on board. From foreign capitals to U.S. statehouses, it is a way to extend our shrinking newsrooms, begin to rebuild public trust, and ensure that the standards of the professional press help shape the development of new journalistic endeavors.”
On June 11, at the national Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in Baltimore, the founders and directors of several nonprofit investigative reporting centers met and talked over roughly 11 hours at a special session organized by Brant Houston, Knight professor at the University of Illinois and former IRE executive director, and Mark Horvit, IRE’s current executive director. Never before in the more than 30-year history of IRE national conferences have nonprofit investigative news publishers ever met for a day-long program of discussion panels and conversation. The special session [Special track: Building investigative journalism centers and funding your own projects ] was made possible by the Knight Foundation. Officials from the Ethics and Excellence Foundation and the McCormick Foundation also participated.
Historic Pocantico meeting brings nonprofits together
On June 29, 2009, roughly three dozen people including the leaders of 20 U.S. nonprofit news organizations began meeting over three days at the Pocantico Conference Center at the Rockefeller estate north of New York City. The co-organizers of this remarkable event were Buzenberg and Rosenthal, with Houston and yours truly also comprising the de facto “steering committee” for the conference and its agenda, and it was all made possible by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Surdna Foundation and the William Penn Foundation.
The setting for the historic meeting could hardly have been more ironic – the 120-acre estate created by John D. Rockefeller a century earlier, America’s richest man whose company was famously skewered by investigative reporter Ida Tarbell in her classic work, The History of the Standard Oil Company . With a conference website for participants auspiciously entitled “Building an Investigative News Network ,” not-for-profit muckrakers mulled over how to enlarge the public space for serious journalism. Several groups and individuals wanted to attend and participate in the conversation but could not because of the strict meeting space limitations of the Pocantico Conference Center – obviously there will be many more, larger discussions in the future.
Can the new collectivization but also increasing editorial, financial, operational collaboration of these nonprofit journalistic organizations result in greater dissemination and public impact? Can a new Investigative News Network platform provide creative new ways to generate earned, shared revenue which will improve the financial sturdiness and self-sustainability of these respectable, well-intentioned enterprises? That is certainly the hope.
Of course, the impulse toward organizing news outlets, into a news-sharing, not-for-profit cooperative is hardly new. It should be noted that some of our largest, oldest and most venerable media institutions in the U.S. are nonprofit corporations, such as the Associated Press (which began as a cooperative syndication service among a few newspapers in 1846), National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System (including the longest-running television documentary program Frontline ), National Geographic , Consumer Reports , Mother Jones , Foreign Affairs , Harper’s , the Christian Science Monitor and numerous other newspapers. The two largest, most respected nonprofit news organizations, AP and NPR, while certainly honored over many decades for the consistently high quality of their daily reporting, do not devote substantial resources to investigative journalism. Nonetheless, they and other major news outlets are becoming increasingly aware of the changing landscape of nonprofit, investigative news content.
For example, on June 13, 2009, the Associated Press announced that beginning in July, it will make investigative stories from four nonprofit news organizations – the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop and ProPublica – available to its member newspapers. That came six months after the December 8, 2008 announcement that the Pulitzer Prizes , for the first time since their inception in 1917, may be awarded not just to newspapers, but other news organizations that publish only on the Internet, which are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories;” and that adhere to “the highest journalistic principles.” These two seismic events are a direct response to the incredible shrinking newspaper industry crisis and the new emerging ecosystem. What does it mean? That in the foreseeable future, more investigative content from more respected nonprofit news organizations will likely be added by the AP to its wire service offerings. And a story or series of stories published by a nonprofit investigative news organization will win a Pulitzer Prize.
Outlines of an Investigative News Network
One thing that is quite obvious from the recent months of exciting ferment is that there is confusion and ambiguity over exactly what an Investigative News Network ought to be and which organizations ought to be included. Some news organizations obviously are much more investigative-minded than others, for one thing – how and where is the line exactly drawn, and is that even possible or a good idea? After all, it has never really been done in traditional, commercial journalism. We are present at the creation of something significant and auspicious, yet in our nanosecond, warp-speed world, its precise definition is still unclear and cannot be glibly explained in a clever tweet. There is a public need to identify the most notable nonprofit news publishers operating today in the United States, some large, well-funded and established, some quite small and only just begun, some hard-core muckrakers to the exclusion of all other forms of journalism, winners of numerous national investigative reporting awards, some in just their first year of operation or only occasional publishers of investigative stories.
The epidemiology of quality investigative information from its original sources to its release into the major national news stream has not been precisely studied by anyone, yet. Some of the organizations included here are predominantly data, documents and research-oriented, their illuminative information made available online or in studies or books, sometimes making national or international news. Others also rely on primary source documents but also then contact and interview people who can shed additional light on the subject at hand, all combined into a written news story. Some publish investigative historical accounts, revealing insightful, contextual, longitudinal information going back decades to today. Others almost entirely do daily reporting, locally, regionally or nationally.
The media platforms for the content, along with the exact subject matter and even the inherent quality of the reporting and writing, vary as they always do from journalist to journalist, publisher to publisher. But all of the organizations represented at Pocantico and beyond are quite capable of producing serious, high quality journalism, and they thus represent an oasis in the growing desert of hollowed out newsrooms and facts-deficient, blogosphere blather.
Besides nonprofit legal and tax exempt status (directly or indirectly) and a serious, circumspect modus operandi to produce substantive research and reporting, all of the organizations which might presumably comprise a new, extraordinary Investigative News Network were founded or co-founded and are led by professional journalists, responsible for overseeing the editorial process from the very beginning, from the story idea and assignment stage to publication. None of the groups is an advocacy organization or a 501(c) (4) lobbying entity. And all of the member organizations would disclose their major sources of funding online.
As this new nonprofit investigative journalism world continues to develop, so too will its collective, de facto sensibilities become clearer, about building credibility and ensuring public trust overall, about the importance of basic organizational transparency and “best practices,” editorial independence and exacting standards regarding the newsgathering process.
However tangible and constructive the outcome of the Pocantico conference and its afterglow towards journalistic collaboration, whether or not an Investigative News Network of public service news publishers actually comes to pass, the Investigative Reporting Workshop will, at the very least, monitor, analyze and chronicle this fascinating evolution, in the United States and around the world. What else happens, and what precise leadership role the Workshop itself might play in helping to establish and develop this new model for investigative reporting, will become much clearer in the months ahead.
BY CHARLES LEWIS
http://www.investigativereportingworkshop.org/ilab/investigative_news_network/
June 29, 2009
According to a May 2009 report written by Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism (“New Media Makers ”), “since 2005, 180 foundations, large and small, have contributed nearly $128 million to U.S. news and information projects.” And that excludes the substantial funding given annually to public broadcasting.
These surprising numbers reflect the precise extent of the philanthropic response to the current crisis in journalism and the widening perception that America faces a larger, civic crisis as well, for local communities and for the nation. For without information, without an informed citizenry, how can citizens hold their elected officials accountable in a representative democracy?
Roughly half of that philanthropic support has gone to support investigative journalism, and more than $56 million went to three nonprofit organizations: the Center for Investigative Reporting, begun in 1977, the Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, and ProPublica, which started in 2008. But more broadly, and in direct response to the commercial news media meltdown, something historically stunning has been occurring – nonprofit investigative reporting centers are proliferating throughout the nation, a new entrepreneurialism brought about largely by the diaspora of working journalists simply searching for a hospitable milieu in which to do their important work.
Increasingly, the most ambitious reporting projects will emanate from the public realm, not from private, commercial outlets. And if present trends continue, which appears likely, by 2010 the amount of nonprofit journalism funding annually supporting “public service journalism” via these centers may rival and possibly even exceed what America’s newspapers spent on investigative reporting “I-teams” in the apogee of print journalism. And that is a historically significant, tectonic shift in the working dynamics of investigative reporting in the United States.
Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, recently initiated unprecedented conversations about the growing need for collaboration among the nonprofit investigative centers. These efforts were applauded by the Columbia Journalism Review (“All Together Now,” May/June 2009): “Collaboration needs to become central to journalism’s mission – and the mainstream press needs to get on board. From foreign capitals to U.S. statehouses, it is a way to extend our shrinking newsrooms, begin to rebuild public trust, and ensure that the standards of the professional press help shape the development of new journalistic endeavors.”
On June 11, at the national Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in Baltimore, the founders and directors of several nonprofit investigative reporting centers met and talked over roughly 11 hours at a special session organized by Brant Houston, Knight professor at the University of Illinois and former IRE executive director, and Mark Horvit, IRE’s current executive director. Never before in the more than 30-year history of IRE national conferences have nonprofit investigative news publishers ever met for a day-long program of discussion panels and conversation. The special session [Special track: Building investigative journalism centers and funding your own projects ] was made possible by the Knight Foundation. Officials from the Ethics and Excellence Foundation and the McCormick Foundation also participated.
Historic Pocantico meeting brings nonprofits together
On June 29, 2009, roughly three dozen people including the leaders of 20 U.S. nonprofit news organizations began meeting over three days at the Pocantico Conference Center at the Rockefeller estate north of New York City. The co-organizers of this remarkable event were Buzenberg and Rosenthal, with Houston and yours truly also comprising the de facto “steering committee” for the conference and its agenda, and it was all made possible by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Surdna Foundation and the William Penn Foundation.
The setting for the historic meeting could hardly have been more ironic – the 120-acre estate created by John D. Rockefeller a century earlier, America’s richest man whose company was famously skewered by investigative reporter Ida Tarbell in her classic work, The History of the Standard Oil Company . With a conference website for participants auspiciously entitled “Building an Investigative News Network ,” not-for-profit muckrakers mulled over how to enlarge the public space for serious journalism. Several groups and individuals wanted to attend and participate in the conversation but could not because of the strict meeting space limitations of the Pocantico Conference Center – obviously there will be many more, larger discussions in the future.
Can the new collectivization but also increasing editorial, financial, operational collaboration of these nonprofit journalistic organizations result in greater dissemination and public impact? Can a new Investigative News Network platform provide creative new ways to generate earned, shared revenue which will improve the financial sturdiness and self-sustainability of these respectable, well-intentioned enterprises? That is certainly the hope.
Of course, the impulse toward organizing news outlets, into a news-sharing, not-for-profit cooperative is hardly new. It should be noted that some of our largest, oldest and most venerable media institutions in the U.S. are nonprofit corporations, such as the Associated Press (which began as a cooperative syndication service among a few newspapers in 1846), National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System (including the longest-running television documentary program Frontline ), National Geographic , Consumer Reports , Mother Jones , Foreign Affairs , Harper’s , the Christian Science Monitor and numerous other newspapers. The two largest, most respected nonprofit news organizations, AP and NPR, while certainly honored over many decades for the consistently high quality of their daily reporting, do not devote substantial resources to investigative journalism. Nonetheless, they and other major news outlets are becoming increasingly aware of the changing landscape of nonprofit, investigative news content.
For example, on June 13, 2009, the Associated Press announced that beginning in July, it will make investigative stories from four nonprofit news organizations – the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop and ProPublica – available to its member newspapers. That came six months after the December 8, 2008 announcement that the Pulitzer Prizes , for the first time since their inception in 1917, may be awarded not just to newspapers, but other news organizations that publish only on the Internet, which are “primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories;” and that adhere to “the highest journalistic principles.” These two seismic events are a direct response to the incredible shrinking newspaper industry crisis and the new emerging ecosystem. What does it mean? That in the foreseeable future, more investigative content from more respected nonprofit news organizations will likely be added by the AP to its wire service offerings. And a story or series of stories published by a nonprofit investigative news organization will win a Pulitzer Prize.
Outlines of an Investigative News Network
One thing that is quite obvious from the recent months of exciting ferment is that there is confusion and ambiguity over exactly what an Investigative News Network ought to be and which organizations ought to be included. Some news organizations obviously are much more investigative-minded than others, for one thing – how and where is the line exactly drawn, and is that even possible or a good idea? After all, it has never really been done in traditional, commercial journalism. We are present at the creation of something significant and auspicious, yet in our nanosecond, warp-speed world, its precise definition is still unclear and cannot be glibly explained in a clever tweet. There is a public need to identify the most notable nonprofit news publishers operating today in the United States, some large, well-funded and established, some quite small and only just begun, some hard-core muckrakers to the exclusion of all other forms of journalism, winners of numerous national investigative reporting awards, some in just their first year of operation or only occasional publishers of investigative stories.
The epidemiology of quality investigative information from its original sources to its release into the major national news stream has not been precisely studied by anyone, yet. Some of the organizations included here are predominantly data, documents and research-oriented, their illuminative information made available online or in studies or books, sometimes making national or international news. Others also rely on primary source documents but also then contact and interview people who can shed additional light on the subject at hand, all combined into a written news story. Some publish investigative historical accounts, revealing insightful, contextual, longitudinal information going back decades to today. Others almost entirely do daily reporting, locally, regionally or nationally.
The media platforms for the content, along with the exact subject matter and even the inherent quality of the reporting and writing, vary as they always do from journalist to journalist, publisher to publisher. But all of the organizations represented at Pocantico and beyond are quite capable of producing serious, high quality journalism, and they thus represent an oasis in the growing desert of hollowed out newsrooms and facts-deficient, blogosphere blather.
Besides nonprofit legal and tax exempt status (directly or indirectly) and a serious, circumspect modus operandi to produce substantive research and reporting, all of the organizations which might presumably comprise a new, extraordinary Investigative News Network were founded or co-founded and are led by professional journalists, responsible for overseeing the editorial process from the very beginning, from the story idea and assignment stage to publication. None of the groups is an advocacy organization or a 501(c) (4) lobbying entity. And all of the member organizations would disclose their major sources of funding online.
As this new nonprofit investigative journalism world continues to develop, so too will its collective, de facto sensibilities become clearer, about building credibility and ensuring public trust overall, about the importance of basic organizational transparency and “best practices,” editorial independence and exacting standards regarding the newsgathering process.
However tangible and constructive the outcome of the Pocantico conference and its afterglow towards journalistic collaboration, whether or not an Investigative News Network of public service news publishers actually comes to pass, the Investigative Reporting Workshop will, at the very least, monitor, analyze and chronicle this fascinating evolution, in the United States and around the world. What else happens, and what precise leadership role the Workshop itself might play in helping to establish and develop this new model for investigative reporting, will become much clearer in the months ahead.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Il Duce Esq.: MI5 and Mussolini
Recruited by MI5: the name's Mussolini. Benito Mussolini
Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5
Tom Kington in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 October 2009
Benito Mussolini in Dress Uniform
Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.
Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.
For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to "persuade'' peace protesters to stay at home.
Mussolini's payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5's man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.
Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: "Britain's least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia's pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today."
Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare's papers.
As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.
"The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash," said Martland.
"I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses."
After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.
His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.
"There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy," said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew's history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.
The unpopularity of the Hoare-Laval pact in Britain forced Hoare to resign. Mussolini, meanwhile, built on his new colonial clout to ally with Hitler, entering the second world war in 1940, this time to fight against the allies.
Deposed following the allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini was killed with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans while fleeing Italy in an attempt to reach Switzerland two years later.
Martland said: "Mussolini ended his life hung upside down in Milan, but history has not been kind to Hoare either, condemned as an appeaser of fascism alongside Neville Chamberlain."
Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5
Tom Kington in Rome
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 October 2009
Benito Mussolini in Dress Uniform
Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce's CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.
Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.
For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to "persuade'' peace protesters to stay at home.
Mussolini's payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5's man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.
Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: "Britain's least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia's pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today."
Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare's papers.
As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.
"The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash," said Martland.
"I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses."
After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.
His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.
"There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy," said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew's history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.
The unpopularity of the Hoare-Laval pact in Britain forced Hoare to resign. Mussolini, meanwhile, built on his new colonial clout to ally with Hitler, entering the second world war in 1940, this time to fight against the allies.
Deposed following the allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Mussolini was killed with his mistress, Clara Petacci, by Italian partisans while fleeing Italy in an attempt to reach Switzerland two years later.
Martland said: "Mussolini ended his life hung upside down in Milan, but history has not been kind to Hoare either, condemned as an appeaser of fascism alongside Neville Chamberlain."
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Afghanistan 'Mission' to Exceed 2011 Withdrawal "Deadline"
BREAKING: Harper Lies Exposed:
Afghanistan 'Mission' to Exceed 2011 Withdrawal "Deadline"
by C. L. Cook
The man whose friends need more than a little help from Canadian taxpayers, (already in the hole on the Afghanistan adventure to the tune of billions of dollars, albeit Canadian dollars, with no clear accounting discernible) now says the 2011 "withdrawal" agreement hammered out in the parliament is as illusory as the caves of Osama bin Laden.
State broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC online) is today doing service for the "New Government of Canada," sending media trial balloons o'er the Autumnal Canadian skies declaring a redefinition of what they meant those long months ago when intoning the words "mission" and "withdrawal."
Quoting the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) spokesperson, Dimitri Soudas, the CBC reveals there will in fact be Canadian soldiers stationed in Afghanistan beyond the parliament mandated expiry date of late 2011. Soudas adds though a caveat, saying there will be "fewer."
"I would caution you against saying dozens or hundreds or a thousand, there will be exponentially fewer. Whether there's 20 or 60 or 80 or 100, they will not be conducting combat operations."
So much for parliament.
Of course, like Osama and the cave-dwelling masterminds of 9/11, Harper's promise of an end finally for Canadian entanglements within benighted Afghanistan is just so much shadow-play on the walls; to be shared for public consumption, and not to be taken seriously.
Plainly and simply, all said so far are lies told to incrementally continue Canada's relentless march towards a permanent state of militarization in union, (or harmonization) with the United States and the rest of the desperate West. Between the lines of the latest communique from his bunker in Ottawa, Harper asks us to keep faith in 'The Mission' and its missionary's position saying laying atop the people of Afghanistan with boots and bayonets will usher forth the birth of democracy, and all that prostituted term stands for.
How Many Bodies, How Many Billions?
"When we have men and women in uniform, diplomats and development workers who are putting their lives on the line, the government will spend what is necessary to make sure they are safe and successful."
"Well, let me be very clear …Canada's military mission in Afghanistan will end in 2011."
— Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Some in parliament that voted in 2008 to extend Canada's participation in Quagmiristan past the originally past due date of 2009 are squawking now about the New Government's shifting position-through redefinition. The CBC cites befuddled New Democrat foreign affairs critic, Paul Dewar begging, before the latest pronouncement for clarity, saying;
"We have one minister, minister MacKay, saying we're going to be there after 2011, there will be a role for the military. We have the prime minister and other ministers — minister [Lawrence] Cannon — getting up and saying, it's all over in 2011. What do you say to the men and women [serving there]? And what do you say to Canadians? And, finally, what do you say to our allies?"
Despite enjoying the political immunity low expectations confer, and confident it will likely never form a government within living potentiality, the NDP has still sat on the fence on the Afghanistan file. While NDP leader, Jack Layton has been the most forceful among the three national parties (the Bloc Quebecois being the most outspoken) against the war and continued occupation, he has consistently fallen short of calling for immediate withdrawal. That reluctance may be coming to an end, with Dewar demanding;
"We should be putting our allies on notice in written form that we are out and the date. If we don't do that, we're not being responsible to our allies, we're not being responsible to the men and women who are serving, and we're not being accountable to Canadians."
As of writing, 131 soldiers, two aid workers, and one Canadian diplomat are officially listed as killed in Afghanistan. Numbers of physically and emotionally wounded are more difficult to come by, but as with every war, the tally can never reflect the true costs to the individuals and their families, or to the nation. Canada does not release, if indeed it records, the estimated numbers of locals and fighters killed and maimed through its actions.
With two years left on the parliamentary "mandate" yet to run, the prime minister added his murky comments to the muddied waters of Canada's future intentions, saying;
"We set out some time-lines there for training and for exit and the government has no intention of asking for an extension of that mission. By the time we reach 2011, we will have been in Afghanistan longer than we will have been in both world wars combined, so I think it is time to transform that mission towards development and humanitarian efforts."
That Depends on the Definition of "That"
Though it's difficult to imagine Stephen Harper having had sexual relations with that mission, the "that" qualifier twice appearing in his parting statement are pure meal. Harper's sleight of hand and sidling into legalese regarding the nature of this mission and that is, in the opinion of one cynical reader, merely another slap in the face of parliament and the vaunted democratic process Harper and his allies repeatedly claim to wish for the people of Afghanistan.
It's also a bare-faced rebuke to the majority of Canadians who continue now to oppose Canada's involvement in this disastrous misadventure as they have from the beginning. And, if Mr. Harper's latest statement is to be believed, it means a coming of full circle too for how "The Mission" was first presented to Canadians as a humanitarian effort so long, and too many lives, ago.
Chris Cook is managing editor at www.pacificfreepress.com and broad/webcasts Gorilla Radio from the studios of CFUV Radio at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca
Afghanistan 'Mission' to Exceed 2011 Withdrawal "Deadline"
by C. L. Cook
The man whose friends need more than a little help from Canadian taxpayers, (already in the hole on the Afghanistan adventure to the tune of billions of dollars, albeit Canadian dollars, with no clear accounting discernible) now says the 2011 "withdrawal" agreement hammered out in the parliament is as illusory as the caves of Osama bin Laden.
State broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC online) is today doing service for the "New Government of Canada," sending media trial balloons o'er the Autumnal Canadian skies declaring a redefinition of what they meant those long months ago when intoning the words "mission" and "withdrawal."
Quoting the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) spokesperson, Dimitri Soudas, the CBC reveals there will in fact be Canadian soldiers stationed in Afghanistan beyond the parliament mandated expiry date of late 2011. Soudas adds though a caveat, saying there will be "fewer."
"I would caution you against saying dozens or hundreds or a thousand, there will be exponentially fewer. Whether there's 20 or 60 or 80 or 100, they will not be conducting combat operations."
So much for parliament.
Of course, like Osama and the cave-dwelling masterminds of 9/11, Harper's promise of an end finally for Canadian entanglements within benighted Afghanistan is just so much shadow-play on the walls; to be shared for public consumption, and not to be taken seriously.
Plainly and simply, all said so far are lies told to incrementally continue Canada's relentless march towards a permanent state of militarization in union, (or harmonization) with the United States and the rest of the desperate West. Between the lines of the latest communique from his bunker in Ottawa, Harper asks us to keep faith in 'The Mission' and its missionary's position saying laying atop the people of Afghanistan with boots and bayonets will usher forth the birth of democracy, and all that prostituted term stands for.
How Many Bodies, How Many Billions?
"When we have men and women in uniform, diplomats and development workers who are putting their lives on the line, the government will spend what is necessary to make sure they are safe and successful."
"Well, let me be very clear …Canada's military mission in Afghanistan will end in 2011."
— Prime Minister Stephen Harper
Some in parliament that voted in 2008 to extend Canada's participation in Quagmiristan past the originally past due date of 2009 are squawking now about the New Government's shifting position-through redefinition. The CBC cites befuddled New Democrat foreign affairs critic, Paul Dewar begging, before the latest pronouncement for clarity, saying;
"We have one minister, minister MacKay, saying we're going to be there after 2011, there will be a role for the military. We have the prime minister and other ministers — minister [Lawrence] Cannon — getting up and saying, it's all over in 2011. What do you say to the men and women [serving there]? And what do you say to Canadians? And, finally, what do you say to our allies?"
Despite enjoying the political immunity low expectations confer, and confident it will likely never form a government within living potentiality, the NDP has still sat on the fence on the Afghanistan file. While NDP leader, Jack Layton has been the most forceful among the three national parties (the Bloc Quebecois being the most outspoken) against the war and continued occupation, he has consistently fallen short of calling for immediate withdrawal. That reluctance may be coming to an end, with Dewar demanding;
"We should be putting our allies on notice in written form that we are out and the date. If we don't do that, we're not being responsible to our allies, we're not being responsible to the men and women who are serving, and we're not being accountable to Canadians."
As of writing, 131 soldiers, two aid workers, and one Canadian diplomat are officially listed as killed in Afghanistan. Numbers of physically and emotionally wounded are more difficult to come by, but as with every war, the tally can never reflect the true costs to the individuals and their families, or to the nation. Canada does not release, if indeed it records, the estimated numbers of locals and fighters killed and maimed through its actions.
With two years left on the parliamentary "mandate" yet to run, the prime minister added his murky comments to the muddied waters of Canada's future intentions, saying;
"We set out some time-lines there for training and for exit and the government has no intention of asking for an extension of that mission. By the time we reach 2011, we will have been in Afghanistan longer than we will have been in both world wars combined, so I think it is time to transform that mission towards development and humanitarian efforts."
That Depends on the Definition of "That"
Though it's difficult to imagine Stephen Harper having had sexual relations with that mission, the "that" qualifier twice appearing in his parting statement are pure meal. Harper's sleight of hand and sidling into legalese regarding the nature of this mission and that is, in the opinion of one cynical reader, merely another slap in the face of parliament and the vaunted democratic process Harper and his allies repeatedly claim to wish for the people of Afghanistan.
It's also a bare-faced rebuke to the majority of Canadians who continue now to oppose Canada's involvement in this disastrous misadventure as they have from the beginning. And, if Mr. Harper's latest statement is to be believed, it means a coming of full circle too for how "The Mission" was first presented to Canadians as a humanitarian effort so long, and too many lives, ago.
Chris Cook is managing editor at www.pacificfreepress.com and broad/webcasts Gorilla Radio from the studios of CFUV Radio at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca
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