I don't know, I guess I have a thing for political music.

The Fukushima disaster has certainly provoked a massive global debate about the safety of nuclear power and the alternatives. When I wrote about the subject in the special issue of New Internationalist on nuclear power, I got the sense from many people I spoke with that the legacy of Chernobyl was starting to fade and that the nuclear industry was starting to enjoy a resurgence, especially as concerns about climate-damaging greenhouse gas emissions have come to the fore.

Now, sadly, we have a more recent disaster to focus the mind on the dire consequences of going down the nuclear path. Recently, it has emerged that during the peak of the crisis, authorities were even considering evacuating Tokyo even as they were trying to reassure the public and do damage control. Crazy.

Read Greenpeace's latest report Lessons from Fukushima for more info.

There are two kinds of cleanup operations in the Gulf of Mexico: the real one and the one that allows us to continue indulging in fossil fuel fantasy. Both are problematic, argues Adam Ma’anit.

In the days after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing the pent-up hydrocarbon reservoir of Miocene rage it was tapping, the full impacts of the disaster were largely unknown. Nearly a month on, there were still doubts about the degree of devastation that would ultimately ensue. BP CEO at the time, Tony Hayward, infamously asserted in late May that ‘the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.’

BP already had an atrocious health and safety record in the US – even by industry standards. The company was still being rapped for continuing violations at its Texas City refinery – the site of a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured over 100. It was facing record fines over leaks and poor maintenance in Alaska where two major spills in 2006 led to widespread concern about the expansion of oil exploration in the fragile Arctic. In 2006, Senior Group Vice President John Mogford said of Texas City: ‘If we’ve learned one thing from this tragedy, it’s the need for humility.’ How the company has operated since, however, reeks of corporate hubris.

Off the deep end
The US was, and still is, a crucial market for the company. BP was therefore keen to demonstrate to the American public and officials that it had learned the lessons of the past. But it was also hoping to win greater market share in the US by expanding its operations in Alaska’s North Slope, as well as its hugely successful deepwater finds in the Gulf of Mexico. The ill-fated Deepwater Horizon had previously drilled BP’s massive Tiber oil field in the Gulf seven months earlier – one of the deepest wells ever drilled and containing an estimated six billion barrels of oil. In 2007, hobbled by its spate of disasters and poor image in the US, newly installed CEO Tony Hayward recanted his predecessor’s much lauded commitment to end the company’s financial support to politicians and parties.

BP’s policy reversal on buying political favours paid off big time. Despite an atrocious safety record, the company was able to secure permits to expand its Arctic operations in the Beaufort Sea and become the largest leaseholder in the Gulf of Mexico, including its infamous Macondo prospect that was being drilled by the Deepwater Horizon when it blew up.

The timing of this disaster was certainly problematic for President Obama, who only a few weeks before the disaster had announced a massive expansion of offshore oil exploration in the US. During the presidential campaign, he was vociferously against drilling, yet after assuming the presidency he made a dramatic u-turn. Obama had been one of the top recipients of BP ‘donations’ in the previous year. On 31 March 2010, the now US President Obama announced that he was opening up 167 million acres of untapped seabed for potential exploration and production. Three weeks later, a deepwater rig exploded.

The other cleanup operation
The US government was quick to respond to concerns about a potential ecological disaster. Just one day after the explosion, US Coast Guard’s Rear Admiral Mary Landry confidently told ABC News: ‘We’ve been able to determine there is nothing emanating from the wellhead.’ A few days later, after it became obvious that oil was in fact gushing out of BP’s deepwater well, the official estimates by the White House, the Coast Guard and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all echoed BP’s paltry 1,000 barrels a day estimate. This despite experts having access to live video of the leaks as well as data about the reservoir, water temperature and conditions that could have helped them make a far more educated assessment.

As the weeks went by and NASA satellite images revealed an enormous amoeba-like hydrocarbon sludge swelling daily, we were inundated in the media and official sources with technical information of the cleanup operations replete with military language like ‘command centre’ and ‘top kill’, spreading the impression that things were getting done. Meanwhile, actual on-the-ground media coverage was severely restricted. Journalists were refused access to spoiled beaches and marshlands, independent confirmation of official estimates was sorely lacking, and 24-hour news was blinding us with blowout-preventer schematics and animations of coffers and risers.

Now that news of the spill has almost disappeared from the pages of mainstream media, various reports paint a rosy picture of the aftermath

Still, no one can argue BP didn’t get a roasting in the press or by officials. But the way that transpired seemed quite tight to script. US politicians cried on television, some British politicians rallied support for the beleaguered company, Obama strode pensively along oil-soaked sand, images of the BP ‘command centre’ were endemic, Tony Hayward went yachting. The saga provided all flavours of catharsis. Americans got to bash the Brits. The Brits got to snipe about the Yanks. Hayward was a deliciously cretinous villain.

Rose-tinted reportage
Now that news of the spill has almost disappeared from the pages of mainstream media, various reports seem determined to paint a rosy picture of the aftermath. One unattributed Agence France Presse story widely picked up by the major media is characteristic: ‘Gulf focus shifts, but where is all the oil?’ its headline asks. Continuing with the military theme so popular in the reporting of this crisis, it adds: ‘Only weeks ago, the slick was an unstoppable force that couldn’t be prevented from swamping shorelines and slowly choking helpless pelicans, now the oil is an elusive enemy, one that has to be tracked down.’

The chemical dispersants that were used in the cleanup operation (a substance banned for use in the British coastline due to toxicity concerns), combined with the warm waters of the Gulf did indeed do their job and disperse the oil, but by doing so, the oil is now more diffuse and able to be ingested by smaller organisms – the full impacts of which are still poorly understood. Particularly as these organisms will be ingested by others higher up the food chain.

BP used two million gallons of the controversial chemical dispersant Corexit, manufactured by US-based Nalco. The whistleblower support group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) spoke with several toxicologists and scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency – the agency which approved its use – who claim their warnings to superiors were ignored and that decisions were made without consulting the relevant experts. Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, told The Guardian: ‘The concern was that the agency appeared to be flying blind and not consulting its own specialists and even the literature that was available.’ Scientists from Tulane University have found that nearly 80 per cent of blue crab larvae sampled in a stretch of coast from Louisiana to Florida since the spill had disturbing orange blobs stuck inside their shells. One of the team members, Dr Erin Grey, said: ‘This is something that researchers with decades of experience have never seen before, and we think it must be linked to the spill.’

Despite the mounting evidence of possible disastrous ecological impacts on sea life and the sheer volume of toxic hydrocarbons and dispersants released in the waters of the Gulf, some in the media seem to want to move on. A New York Times article in late July declared: ‘The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected, a piece of good news that raises tricky new questions about how fast the government should scale back its response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.’ Although the report goes on to admit that there are still many ‘known unknowns’, as former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might say, its rosy evaluation of the long-term impacts is indicative of the mood that many in the media, the industry and the US administration seem determined to convey. Now that Tony Hayward’s scalp has been triumphantly brandished to the public, there seems less appetite for monitoring the continuing impacts of one of the world’s worst offshore oil spills.

Magic vs. realism
But it is clear that the oil has not magically vanished. Fanciful assertions about disappearing oil are mostly the result of the dextrous deployment of smoke and mirrors – or rather dispersants and PR. And critical evidence required to assess the true impacts of the disaster is still being withheld from public scrutiny. In an open letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder and BP’s incoming CEO Robert Dudley, scientists have expressed concern about BP’s non-disclosure and confidentiality requirements with regard to releasing scientific data, particularly relating to the use of dispersants. ‘We are greatly concerned with reports that BP is requiring confidentiality agreements in research contracts with scientists, which would preclude them from releasing any of their findings for a three-year period,’ the letter said. ‘Failure to disclose this scientific information in a timely manner hides critically important information from the public – the owners of the natural resources at risk.’

Obama had been one of the top recipients of BP ‘donations’ in the previous year. On 31 March 2010, he announced that he was opening up 167 million acres of untapped seabed for potential exploration and production

To declare the Gulf crisis over, say scientists, is grossly premature and irresponsible. Dr Bruce Stein, Associate Director of the National Wildlife Federation, is highly critical of the notion that the crisis has abated. In a Reuters blog he writes: ‘Previous oil disasters like the Exxon Valdez show the full impact may not be apparent for months or years to come. It wasn’t until four years after the Valdez disaster began that local herring stocks collapsed – and more than two decades later, they haven’t recovered. The bottom line is, it’s irresponsible to draw conclusions about the Gulf oil disaster’s full impacts with so many questions still unanswered.’

When BP chose the code name for its ill-fated deepwater prospect, it probably thought it was being poetic. Macondo is the name of the fictional town in Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’s much-loved novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The bitter irony is that, in the novel, Macondo is a small town transformed by the march of ‘progress’ (in the form of a banana plantation) until it is eventually destroyed by nature. The continued push by the fossil fuel industry into new oil ‘frontiers’ – be it deepwater, the Arctic or the tar sands – and bolstered by governments’ pathological obsession with ‘energy security’ at all costs, provides the drumbeat to this march of ‘progress’. We won’t know for certain what the total impacts of this spill will be for some time to come. What we do know is that our continued reliance on this particular banana plantation to deliver human progress is ultimately a work of fiction.

Adam Ma’anit is a campaigner and energy policy analyst at London-based charity Platform.

The fundamentals of digital activism are little different from its analogue ancestry, argues Adam Ma’anit.

I can remember clearly the first time I ever used the internet. It was on my Commodore 64 – one of the earliest mass-market consumer PCs – and I had just received my shiny new whizz-bang modem. It was a beastly thing – one of those old-fashioned devices that you had to physically put the telephone receiver into like in the 1983 Hollywood film WarGames. After what took an age of bee-ooh-wee ssshrzzkkk dialling noises, I would finally be connected to what we might now think of as more like the British television-based Teletext information system than the modern Web. In fact, back then there was no such thing as the Web and in order to move between ‘sites’ in a world without internet routers you had to redial a new computer. Pages filled with monochromatic text and graphics made using carefully positioned letters were the order of the day. Download speeds were glacial, and often times you would be paying for long-distance calls if you wanted to connect to anything of interest. But it was from these humble roots that the Web began to take shape.

I was too young to really understand the significance of what I was participating in. Like the lead character in WarGames (played by a young Matthew Broderick), all I was really interested in at the time was to find cool games to play – though, perhaps fortunately, I didn’t have the skills to hack in to the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s mainframe and virtually nuke my hometown of Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY. No doubt some budding hackers there are still trying…

By that point, the protozoan Web was already some way along its evolutionary path, with several commercial ‘portals’ and services offering news and chat forums competing for market share of the burgeoning online e-conomy. These were largely ‘walled gardens’ with very little possibility to peer into the neighbouring portal’s virtual backyard.

There were, however, alternative and free services such as the famous Bulletin Board Services run by enthusiasts from machines in their own homes. Connections weren’t always reliable but the sense of community was strong, with various individuals pitching in to expand the service offerings, run particular enthusiast forums and discussion boards and manage community news information. You had the feeling that you were part of an élite club of people using the latest cutting-edge technology. Floppy disks were actually floppy, ‘hard’ drives were on flimsy cassette tape, and tapping out commands on the clickety-clackety keyboards provided an audible reassurance in common with the typewriters of yesteryear. But it was thanks to the modem that you could reach out across decades-old telephone wires to others who shared your passions – be they for simulated war games or otherwise.

It is this very real sense of community that is perhaps one of the most enduring emotive drivers behind the growth and evolution of online technologies. You only have to look at the dizzying success of ‘social-networking’ sites like Facebook and Twitter to see how powerful the desire to come together remains – even if it does sometimes seem to be more motivated by self-aggrandizement than egalitarianism. It is through these very forms of digital community that so-called ‘online activism’ is also at its most effective. And therein lies an important consideration when thinking about digital advocacy – there is not much that is particularly unique to the medium that isn’t part and parcel of any genuine movements for change. The fundamental need for human agency and transformational imperatives endure. The means, speed and expediency of communication and the tools may be different; perhaps, too, the cultural norms and practices of the medium itself. But these differences are not as chasmic as they might, at first glance, seem.

Thanks to the Web, it is now easier to build diverse communities; easier to communicate with potentially massive audiences; and easier to subvert the traditional control structures that imposed – at times arbitrary, at times ruthless – limits on human expression.

I say this not to belittle the truly exciting possibilities that the digital revolution offers, but because at times there seems to be an almost reverential mystique surrounding online trends and technologies that exercises some journalists’ penchant for hyperbole. Those of us not hip to the latest developments may feel equal parts bafflement and awe, perhaps garnished subtly with a fresh-plucked sprig of e-fear. After all, the technology changes so rapidly that it is hard for many of us to keep up, and yet those changes can have enormous impacts on our lives. And because of the pace of change – and crucially, the culture – of the technologies in question, there will always be something new coming down the pipes that could force the next sea change in how we interact, communicate and advocate online. These changes can have dramatic impacts offline as well.

A few years ago we heard that SMS text messaging brought about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; in 2009 Twitter apparently fuelled the youth-led ‘Revolution 2.0’ in Moldova; and Barack Obama was propelled to victory by the digital tide of his groundbreaking and deftly managed e-campaign machinery. You’d be hard-pressed to come across a story on last year’s protests in Iran without the obligatory mention of Facebook and YouTube.

Ghost in the machine
The implication of course is that somehow something special about the technology, the software, or that nebulous entity we call ‘The Web’ itself is behind it all… that some sort of online insurrection is usurping the waning power of the offline élite and that its agency is not people, but programs. Because the reporting of these sorts of phenomena tend to focus on the technology and less on the people behind it, we are left with the impression that some cold calculating machinery is driving the process – like the artificial intelligence machine HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 placidly asking us how we are feeling as it shuts off our ship’s life support systems. If you believe in the possibility of such a capricious ‘code d’état’ of sorts, then you could see why some journalists and pundits have a slight quiver in their voice when reporting on the latest anecdote of digital dethronement. Not only are there forces hurtling through cyberspace with such disruptive power and speed, there doesn’t appear to be anyone at the helm – at least no-one recognizably human. How are you feeling, Dave?

But to ascribe so much power to the technology in and of itself is not only to misunderstand its nature, it is also to undermine the hard work of the millions of committed activists around the world struggling for social change and taking advantage of the best features of the online spaces they in part help to create and develop daily. At worst this shallow technofetish may in fact engender a wave of reactionary technopanic in response – and with it, greater government and corporate control of the web and the resultant erosion of digital freedoms upon which activists, and society as a whole, increasingly depend.

A blog is just a blog. There’s nothing inherently disruptive or revolutionary about it until someone like Egyptian journalist Wael Abbas decides to use it to highlight sexual harassment of women, workers’ strikes or police brutality – issues that were not being covered by the mainstream media. Through his blog, Abbas recorded these stories, backed up by documentation from fellow activists on the ground who would send him their photographic and video evidence of horrendous torture and other human rights abuses often committed by the police. According to Abbas, Egyptian activist bloggers provide, ‘a small spark to start the oven’. Often openly critical of some human rights NGOs and civil society groups for their lack of diligence, he and fellow activists help keep up the pressure for change, often at great personal risk.

‘The good thing about the spark,’ says Abbas, ‘is that it has high voltage.’ But he stresses that it doesn’t obviate the need for the less glamorous work on the ground. ‘We [bloggers] cannot do the whole thing. Civil society has to wake up and do their job. What we do is make it easier for them, by exposing something and making the whole society react to it and then as a result force the government and civil society to interact, to do their job, to solve the issue. Because now people know and they have to do something about it.’¹

The Web isn’t powered by fairy dust and wishes. It’s powered by people – people who write code, create art and design, make videos and music, share stories, knowledge and information. What’s changed is that thanks to the Web it is now much easier to disseminate that information than it used to be. Cue technology writer Clay Shirky: ‘The new communications infrastructure did not cause the uprising [in Iran]. What caused the uprising was political discontent. It’s just that when people in their moment of need wanted to do something co-ordinated, they could suddenly lay their hands on these tools, in a way they hadn’t been able to before.’²

Thanks to the Web, it is now easier to build diverse communities; easier to communicate with potentially massive audiences; and easier to subvert the traditional control structures that imposed – at times arbitrary, at times ruthless – limits on human expression. In geek parlance, the Web ‘scales’.

Threats to digital freedom
This ability to scale-up human expression means the potential to scale-up dissent, democracy and digital rights as well. But repression can scale up too. Many governments and corporations would like to have more control over the internet itself, in part because of fears – both misplaced and real – of the Web’s unrestrained anarchic and emancipatory potential. The corporate titans of the Net, such as Google, Facebook, Ebay, Amazon, Paypal and Microsoft, are already being described in terms of the Carnegies and Rockefellers of the past with their comparative dominance over vital parts of the infrastructure of the digital economy, just as the robber barons of old controlled critical rail and steel industries. Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, agrees that we are already in an age dominated by these virtual robber barons. ‘You see with the internet, a very pure manifestation of the way in which power works. It lends itself to oligarchy, it lends itself to very narrow élites, and the internet is a perfect reflection of that.’

As globalization morphs rather seamlessly into google-ization, the corporate behemoths must still rely on the apparatus of state to help design the global architecture and rules that permit such huge accumulation of wealth and power. The major film and music industries are pushing hard for an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ‘would require surveillance and censorship of the internet’. ACTA is being negotiated in secret between supposedly democratic entities like the US, Canada, Japan, the EU, Korea, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa and Switzerland; and while some cursory information has been released, there is still concern over the substance of the negotiations and the lack of public debate and scrutiny over some of its more odious details.³ These include granting copyright holders swingeing powers to pursue alleged violations, restrictions on technology that in some way enable copyright violations to take place whether by design or accident, and curbs on freedom of expression through so-called ‘fair use’ provisions whereby people may use copyrighted works for certain non-commercial purposes in the public interest. The irony, of course, is that those same governments negotiating ACTA routinely criticize countries like China for imposing restrictions on digital freedoms. By their actions it would seem that they are really just rather envious of the so-called ‘great firewall of China’.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 being debated in the US Congress proposes to give the President the ability to ‘declare a cybersecurity emergency’ and shut down or limit internet traffic ‘in the interest of national security’. Of course the exact conditions for what would constitute such an emergency and how the ‘interests of national security’ are determined are left hopelessly vague. In Britain, the rather creepily entitled Intercept Modernization Programme proposes to expand the government’s ability to snoop on web users at will and to store all individual users’ web-surfing habits in a centralized database – to help combat ‘crime and terrorism’, of course.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority is proposing a mandatory internet censorship filtering scheme and also threatening website owners with exorbitant fines merely for linking to ‘banned’ websites, including important online resources such as the transparency initiative Wikileaks. Ironically, Wikileaks – founded in-part by Chinese dissidents seeking to circumvent restrictions on free access to information in China – is on the blacklist in Australia for publishing the Danish government’s list of banned websites. ‘The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship,’ observed Wikileaks in response.⁴

Thanks to Wikileaks, and its facility to enable anonymous and secure uploading of sensitive documents from anywhere, we have documented evidence of: friendly fire and civilian casualties in Afghanistan; political assassinations carried out by members of the Kenyan police; insider trading from a major Icelandic bank just before its collapse; details of toxic dumping by Trafigura in the Ivory Coast; telephone intercept recordings of Peruvian politicians and lobbyists colluding to win contracts for a Norwegian oil company, which ultimately brought down the government; and the membership list of the Far Right British National Party.

For many activists dependent on the free and unrestrained internet, the fight to defend digital freedoms is therefore critical. Movements such as the Creative Commons are working to provide a legal basis for open exchange and sharing of information through the use of licensing models that fit the reuse and remix culture of the web. Civil liberty groups such as the previously mentioned Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Britain’s Open Rights Group actively campaign against attempts by governments and corporations to enclose the digital commons, increase Big Brother surveillance of ordinary people, and privilege corporate interests over those of citizens. EFF founder John Perry Barlow – in an effort to articulate a vision of a new social contract for the internet – once wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in response to concerns about government and corporate enclosure of the digital commons, in particular the controversial US Telecom Reform Act of 1996:

‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather… Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here.’⁵

The struggle between the quintessentially horizontal and libertarian spirit of the web against the more commercial and nationalist moves towards greater centralization and control is what technology writer Aleks Krotoski calls the ‘arms race between the citizen and the state’. And guess which side of the conflict has the bigger guns…

The revolution will be open source
Attempts to close-off the Net with the electronic equivalent of concrete, razor wire, landmines and tollbooths flies in the face of the fact that much of the very infrastructure of the internet is built on the grassy green fields of open source code. More than half of all websites are served up by software that is freely available to download, run and modify. A huge proportion of email is similarly routed, using free open source software. The web addressing system known as Domain Name Service is too. The operating systems that many of the highest trafficked websites like Google use are not running on Windows, but open source operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD. The open source movement is more than just a practical way to share the source code of programs so that other developers can make improvements and bug fixes. It’s also a philosophy that posits the notion that the free exchange of information and ideas is the best way to improve society as a whole. Where would we be in terms of scientific progress if Einstein had refused to disclose his formula for energy-mass equivalence (you know the one I mean) citing intellectual property concerns… or if Marie Curie’s discoveries about radiation could only be revealed to a researcher if they signed the sort of Non-Disclosure Agreement commonly used in the proprietary software industry? Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation – a leading digital freedom advocacy group currently headed up by former New Internationalist co-worker Peter Brown – explains what’s at stake: ‘Control over the use of one’s ideas really constitutes control over other people’s lives; and it is usually used to make their lives more difficult.’⁶

Deus ex machina?
There are some who cling to the belief that e-activism is possessed of some innate technical juju that makes it more powerful than its offline or ‘old world’ ancestry. Perhaps it’s because we want to believe that social change can be made easier somehow. That with the click of a button we can end poverty, stop climate change or revitalize democracy all while still in our pyjamas. Unfortunately, there is no such ‘killer app’ for change. By and large the same rules apply in the digital world as they do in the analogue. Identify a problem, determine its cause, be strategic about targets, mobilize action, build community, generate media, engage, confront, challenge, garner political support, maintain and build momentum, build viable pathways for change, broaden and deepen that change, guard against threats, share knowledge, listen, empower and enable others to continue and advance the cause. Wash, rinse, repeat. Pyjamas are optional. Let’s not delude ourselves that any of this is easy.

The reality is that there is no secret ingredient to cooking up social change online. The recipe is still largely the same, only the oven’s been replaced by a microwave and more people can smell if you burnt the soufflé.

Ushahidi – ushahidi.com
Ushahidi (Kiswahili for ‘testimony’ or ‘witness’) was set up in the wake of the political crisis in Kenya after the controversial 2007 elections. Co-founder Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan activist and lawyer, proposed the site when she realized that ordinary people with mobile phones were able to report developments in their communities faster and more accurately than the mainstream media could. Using Google Maps – a free mapping tool – Okolloh and colleagues set about updating their custom map with time- and location-sensitive information about political violence from all sides, sent to them by people using simple SMS text messaging and email.

This novel combination of ‘crowdsourcing’ of information combined with geolocation software, and the ease with which ordinary Kenyans could participate via commonly used mobile phones, proved highly effective at documenting the violence and responses and holding the government and various parties to account for their actions. The software the group developed was later used to document anti-immigrant violence in South Africa, collect eyewitness accounts of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008-09, and is currently being used in Haiti to assist with the emergency work there.

Websites
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Open Rights Group
Free Software Foundation
Creative Commons
Tactical Tech
Wikileaks
Wael Abbas
Global Voices
The Virtual Revolution
The NI Blog
The NI Website

Adam Ma’anit is a former NI co-editor and web manager and is currently baking soufflés at London-based arts and social justice charity PLATFORM.

1. Wael Abbas interviewed by The Hub in Budapest, Hungary 2008, bit.ly/daSyG9
2. In the case of China, for example, Krotoski notes that there are an estimated 30,000 people employed purely to spy on the web-surfing habits of their fellow citizens and report suspicious activity. As quoted in Aleks Krotoski, ‘The Virtual Revolution: How 20 Years of the Web Has Reshaped Our Lives’, bit.ly/bK18qy
3. The latest leaked draft of ACTA can be found at: bit.ly/cGTSZ4
4. wikileaks.org
5. John Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace bit.ly/9cvqlH
6. Richard Stallman, ‘The GNU Manifesto’ bit.ly/dxhQD3

Last summer, 29 people stopped a morning train carrying 1,000 tonnes of coal on its way to Drax power station in Yorkshire. Drax is the largest single source of carbon dioxide in the UK and the largest single producer of the acid-rain-forming nitrous oxide in Europe. If it were a country it would be ranked in the top 100 greenhouse gas polluting nations. It burns coal - a lot of it. Like 13 million tonnes of it every year.

So it is for these reasons that 29 people, concerned about climate change and frustrated by government ineptitude felt obligated to take direct action. They stopped the train with a bright red flag on a stretch of track which only went to Drax. Careful to follow standard railway safety rules, calmly boarded it as some people spoke to the driver, and began shovelling the coal off the train.

One was dressed as a canary traditionally used by miners to warn of dangerous pollution in the air. They dropped a banner saying ‘Leave It In The Ground’ - the only surefire strategy to stop runaway climate change unlike some other pseudo-solutions promoted by government and industry.

They were eventually arrested, but they made a bold and effective statement, caused no harm and only minor disruption and the resultant media they generated helped draw attention to the climate-damaging impacts of burning coal.

A few days ago their trial began, and it was clear that the Crown Prosecution Service was intent on influencing the jury to ignore the climate change arguments they expected the ‘Drax 29’ to use. In their closing arguments, the prosecution made a cynical effort to dismiss the activists’ political and moral convictions as some sort of gambit to win-over the jury: ‘The Crown suspects that what is happening here is that the defendants may seek to play on your emotions, and your sympathies with their cause, if you have them, so as to find them all not guilty.’ And in order to bully the jury into towing the line, the CPO added: ‘If you were to do this, by effectively ignoring the evidence, that would not be true to your oath or affirmation. If they are guilty in law of the offence, then the only true verdict is one of guilty. The Crown says that they are preparing a misuse of the court process to continue the protest action which they started when they boarded that train just over a year ago.’

The next day, the defendants tried to build up their defense by calling in expert witnesses and evidence on the damaging effects that coal burning has on the climate on the basis that they were motivated to take the action they did (which they didn’t dispute was illegal), on the basis that it was justified in light of the greater crime of climate change. The judge however repeatedly stopped them from building such a case and instructed the jury to ignore the climate evidence and focus only on whether or not they were guilty of the specific crimes.

The argument the defendants used was precedented. A similar case involving six Greenpeace activists accused of property damage at the Kingsnorth power station in Kent, was acquitted on the basis that the protestors had a ‘lawful excuse’. Unfortunately, the presiding judge, Justice Spencer, did not see fit to permit this justification in the court proceedings and so the defendants were left to cobble together what defence they could.

And what a defence! Here is the closing arguments made by one of the defendants Jonathan Stevenson yesterday:

Members of the jury.

I’m going to try to summarise why we feel that we are not guilty, why we feel that what we did was right, despite the very proper laws against obstructing trains, why we feel that it was the wrong decision of the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute us in this case, and why we don’t feel that we are guilty of a crime.

I want to start by responding to your request for clarification yesterday about “lawful excuse”. His honour may say [in his summing up] that it’s true that there are ways in law to make space for circumstances, to allow a bigger picture to be considered.

These ways can have different names for different offences — so for example “lawful excuse”, which you asked about yesterday, applies only to the charge of criminal damage. For example, last September, a jury in Kent found six protesters not guilty of committing £30,000 worth of criminal damage to Kingsnorth coal-fired power station, since the group were acting to prevent a greater crime. Those on trial did not disagree that criminal damage is a crime, just that, in certain circumstances, it may be necessary and proportionate to cause some damage to prevent a great crime. That jury agreed.

His honour may explain that there is a legal defence of “necessity”, that applies to most laws, and that it was on the basis of “necessity” — the fact that we believed our actions were going to save lives and that we had to act — that we prepared a legal defence before this trial. Along with many legal professionals we were very disappointed by his honour’s decision prior to the trial that this defence was not available to us in law. Nonetheless we decided not to appeal against it. We felt that you the jury would be free to decide on the facts of a case as you find them - and not just the ones his honour tells you are relevant.

It’s up to you to decide whether what we did was necessary. I would like to emphasise to you that we believed and we still believe that it was urgently necessary to do what we did, and proportionate to the scale of the problem, that the consequences of that train taking coal into Drax are so serious that any reasonable person would understand our reasons for stopping it. To help explain why we were so sure of the links between Drax’s activities and deaths around the world we had expert witnesses lined up to talk to you about the immediate and ongoing harm that Drax’s emissions cause. However from what evidence we have been able to get across to you, with his honour’s indulgence, we hope that you can see that these facts speak for themselves, and our actions, though harmful, were indeed necessary to try to stop a greater harm. And if you agree with that then you still have a legal right – as the jury - to find us not guilty.

You’ve heard it said already I think, that the judge decides about the law, but the jury decide about the facts. What does that mean? It means you the jury can decide as you see fit. You the jury have a constitutional right to follow your own judgement and not necessarily follow the judge’s directions to find us guilty. In other words, you get to make the final decision. In law this principle is called the jury’s power of nullification, and it’s been a right that has been regularly used over the years when juries have felt the law has been applied harshly, or inappropriately, or unjustly, or incorrectly.

Perhaps I can explain this with a quote from a very senior judge, Lord Denning. He said:

“This principle was established as long ago as 1670 in a celebrated case of the Quakers, William Penn and William Mead. All that they had done was to preach in London on a Sunday afternoon. They were charged with causing an unlawful and tumultuous assembly there. The judge directed the jury to find the Quakers guilty, but they refused. The Jury said Penn was guilty of preaching, but not of unlawful assembly. The Judge refused to accept this verdict. He threatened them with all sorts of pains and punishments. He kept them ‘all night without meat, drink, fire, or other accommodation: they had not so much as a chamber pot, though desired’. They still refused to find the Quakers guilty of an unlawful assembly. He kept them another night and still they refused. He then commanded each to answer to his name and give his verdict separately. Each gave his verdict ‘Not Guilty’. For this the judge fined them 40 marks apiece and cast them into prison until it was paid. One of them Edward Bushell, thereupon brought his (case) before the Court of the King’s Bench. It was there held that no judge had any right to imprison a juryman for finding against his direction on a point of law; for the judge could never direct what the law was without knowing the facts, and of the facts the jury were the sole judge. The jury were thereupon set free.”

This was affirmed as recently as 2005, in relation to the case of Wang, where a committee of Law Lords in the highest court in the land, the House of Lords, concluded that: “there are no circumstances in which a judge is entitled to direct a jury to return a verdict of guilty”. So you do have that right to decide for yourselves. And unlike in 1670, his honour won’t be able to fine you, or put you in prison for making what he sees as the wrong decision.

There have been many cases over the years where juries have decided, on reflecting more broadly, to find people not guilty despite directions from the judge. For example, the case of Zelter and others who were accused of damage to an aircraft about to be used for bombing civilians. In all of these and others the judge said that the defendants admitted the offence and so must be found guilty. But the jury chose to look outside the limited view of the court room, and to find them not guilty.

The freedom that you have is what enables the law, where necessary, to move forward. It is what allows you to look beyond the confines of this court to the wider world, and to make a judgement based not just on law, but to make a judgement based on justice. Justice is the force that underpins and breathes life into the law, and it is your role as the jury to see that justice as you see it is done.

We all know that times change, and what was acceptable in one era may not be acceptable in another. You have heard of how it was once legal to own other people, how it was illegal for women to vote. Well one way or another we are going to have to stop burning coal and move on from the fossil fuel era. And that means that the law will eventually have to change and acknowledge the harm that carbon emissions do to all of us, by making them illegal. The only question is whether the law will catch up in time for there to be anything left to protect.

We are not trying to tell you how to decide. We are only trying to say that it is up to you, and we are grateful for that.

I want you to think back to that situation of there being a person on the tracks ahead of that train going on its way to Drax. Members of the Jury, it may sound like a strange thing to say but in truth there is a person on the branch line to Drax. The prosecution have not challenged the facts we presented to you on oath about the consequences of burning coal at Drax. 180 human lives lost every year, species lost forever. There is a direct, unequivocal, proven link between the emissions of carbon dioxide at this power station and the appalling consequences of climate change. That many of those consequences impact on the poor of other nations or people in Hull we don’t know and should not in any way negate the reality of this suffering. We got on that train to stop those emissions, because all other methods in our democracy were failing. Just because we don’t know the name of the person on the tracks or where they live or the exact time and day of their dying, does not in our view mean they are less worthy of protection.

We don’t dispute that there’s a law against obstructing trains. We don’t dispute that obstructing trains is a crime and should continue to be a crime. We just argue that in this case, we should not be found guilty of a crime for trying to block this train on its way to Drax.

On Tuesday the prosecution argued that what we did was quite simply a crime, and as a result we should be found guilty. They were trying to suggest that if you find us not guilty, the whole world would fall apart. We argue that the more likely route to the whole world falling apart is if we continue burning coal in the enormous quantities that it is being burnt at Drax.

His honour may say that we have been telling you stories, that we are trying to introduce emotions into the trial to distort the evidence. But we have been telling you the facts. If those facts move you, that’s because they are moving, and they are what moved us to do what we did.

We are happy to be judged by you, the jury.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to us.

Justice Spencer however was unmoved. Not only that, but he insisted that the jurors should disregard the climate arguments. He wrote:

‘I rule as a matter of law that … evidence concerning the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is inadmissible. To rule otherwise would allow these defendants to hijack the trial process just as surely as they hijacked the coal train.’

As Greenpeace’s Ben Stewart (who was one of the six Greenpeace activists who were acquitted in their trial for alleged criminal damage to Kingsnorth power station) observed, Judge Spencer didn’t even seem to agree that there was any particular need for urgency with climate change – something the government, the UN, the scientific community, the Tories and even Drax don’t dispute! ‘There may well be people who would argue against it, certainly against the urgency [of acting], I don’t know, but it’s irrelevant.’

The defendants now face a £30,000 fine, plus legal expenses and possible community service along with a permanent criminal record. It’s unclear whether they will appeal, many of them must feel exhausted by the whole affair by now. Despite that, there was no sign that their exceptional conviction and determination was in any way diminished by the process. Brian Farrelly, one of the activists said after the guilty verdict was passed: ‘Justice Spencer may think global warming is irrelevant but that doesn’t mean the British public does. The climate change movement is growing with every passing week and we’re not waiting for the politicians to act. This won’t be the last case where climate protesters are in court for taking peaceful direct action, and while some judges may think climate change is irrelevant, they won’t be able to hold back the tide forever.’

And it’s not as if there aren’t mixed messages coming from our political leaders. Was it not Al Gore who said: ‘I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers, preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.’? And wasn’t it the UK’s own climate minister Ed Miliband who invoked the Suffragettes and the anti-Apartheid and feminist movements (none of which were well-known for their law-abiding tactics): ‘When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation… Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.

This weekend a coalition of groups ranging from Greenpeace and the National Union of Students to Oxfam and the Women’s Institute will be taking Ed Miliband’s words to heart when they encircle Kingsnorth to form a giant human band or ‘Mili-Band’ to protest against the expansion of coal power generation on the site. When the Women’s Institute mobilise their members to encircle power stations in order to prevent ‘A World Without Jam’, government and industry can no longer simply dismiss climate activists as being just a fringe group of ‘radicals’. One thing is for sure, Ed Miliband is right to allude to the need for civil disobedience on a scale akin to what past movements such as the Suffragettes and the ANC depended upon in order to effect meaningful and lasting change in society. We require the actions of brave individuals like the Drax 29 to help us get our foot of the gas pedal before we drive off the cliff of runaway climate change.

To help contribute to the Drax 29’s legal expenses, please make a donation to:

Midlands Conservation Club
Sort Code 30-98-00
Account number 02911400

You can also join their Facebook group and follow them on Twitter.

For more info on the Mili-Band action at Kingsnorth this weekend, visit the No New Coal website.

The British ambassador to North Korea, Peter Hughes, came under heavy fire recently for posting what has to be the rosiest-ever depiction of life in one of the world’s most closed and authoritarian societies. Hughes, blogging for the Foreign Commonwealth Office, waxed lyrical about the recent ‘elections’:

‘There was a very festive atmosphere throughout the city. Many people were walking to or from the polling stations, or thronging the parks to have picnics or just stroll. Most of the ladies were dressed in the colourful traditional hanguk pokshik and the men in their best suits. Outside the central polling stations there were bands playing and people dancing and singing to entertain the queues of voters waiting patiently to select their representatives in the country’s unicameral legislature. The booths selling drinks and snacks were very popular with the crowds and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The list of successful candidates was published on Monday. There was a reported turn-out of over 99 per cent of the voters and all the candidates, including Kim Jong Il, were elected with 100 per cent approval.’

After much criticism, Hughes was forced to clarify that the 100 per cent approval was due to there only being one candidate fielded for every post and that the songs people were singing were political songs praising the nation and the leadership. Hughes, however, insisted his intention was to show the human face of Pyongyang. The fact of the matter is that Hughes wasn’t even able to blog from Pyongyang because ‘the technology to set one up is not available to us here’. Perhaps because the people are too busy singing and having picnics in the park to bother blogging about how happy they are...

G20 communiqué goes boldy nowhere where everyone has gone before…

Wide-angle shot of Starship Capitalist Enterprise. Captain James T Kirk Narrating.

Kirk: Captain’s Log Stardate 54352.9: This is our second mission to escort leaders from the Federation to planet G20 just on the edge of the Neutral Free Trade Zone. Unfortunately, the Enterprise has been in dire need of repairs after several entanglements with a mysterious mercantilist species from the derivatives quadrant known as the B.O.R.G. (or what Ship Doctor McCoy has cynically come to call the ‘Banking Oligarchs Ruining the Galaxy’). To date, we’ve tried to make peace with the B.O.R.G. but all attempts at communication have resulted in assimilation. Starfleet’s standing orders are to appease the B.O.R.G. on sight while the G20 leaders attempt to deal with the ongoing intergalactic economic crisis by having dinner cooked by universally renowned celebrity chef Jamie Oliver from the planet Pukka. A fragile truce holds as both the dreaded Romulan empire led by Praetor Sarkozy and the Klingons ruled by Chancellor Merkel are also attending, and both have suffered heavy losses to the B.O.R.G. as well, though they still blame the Anglo-Saxon United Federation of Planets for violating the Sub-Prime Directive.

Kirk continues: The draft G20 communiqué has just been released, and tensions are high. Praetor Sarkozy has threatened to leave the meeting if he is forced to eat Klingon Rokeg blood pie again. The Romulan ale does appear to be helping to calm tensions but hostilities can erupt at any moment. Meanwhile First Officer Spock is feeding the draft communiqué into the computer’s memory banks for analysis in the hopes that we can find a clue that can help us solve the intergalactic economic crisis. Nothing less than the future of Capitalism itself is at stake!

Captain Kirk is signing something for a young blonde ensign as he gives her a flirtatious smile. The ensign forces a sarcastic smile back at Kirk and exchanges knowing glances with fellow female officer Uhura as if to say: ‘What a perv!’. Kirk, oblivious to the exchange, listens as the computer reads out the first segments of the historic communiqué in a staccato voice with what sounds like a typewriter background noise, a blip appears on the screen of Lieutenant Chekov’s screen.

Chekov: Captain, a B.O.R.G wessel has just appeared on our long-range scanners. It appears to be weering towards us on a collision course.

Kirk: Go to red alert lieutenant. On screen.

Chekov: Aye, aye Captain!

Red alert sounds and flashes throughout the ship. Cube-shaped B.O.R.G vessel appears on the main viewing screen of the ship’s bridge.

Kirk: Shields up! Uhura, inform Starfleet of our predicament.

Uhura: Aye, Sir! Starfleet do you read? This is the Capitalist Enterprise. We are under attack by a B.O.R.G. vessel. Repeat...

Kirk: Spock, analysis.

Spock: Scanning now Captain...

Meanwhile computer continues reading G20 communiqué in background...

Computer: O-ver the last half cen-tury strong growth and in-creas-ing in-ter-nat-ion-al trade has brought un-told jobs and pros-perity to our cit-i-zens. We now face the great-est chal-lenge to the galactic e-con-omy in mo-dern times, a cri-sis a-ffect-ing the lives of or-di-na-ry men, wo-men, child-ren, oct-o-pods and o-ther be-ings a-round the u-ni-verse. A gal-actic cri-sis re-quir-es a gal-actic sol-ut-ion.

Ship's doctor Leonard McCoy (aka ‘Bones’) enters ship’s bridge from elevator.

McCoy: God dammit will someone tell me what the hell’s going on around here?

Spock: It would appear, Doctor, that we are on a collision course with a transnational class B.O.R.G vessel. Perhaps it would be prudent to prepare the sick bay for medical emergencies.

Uhura: Captain, message coming in from the B.O.R.G. vessel.

McCoy: Why Spock you cold-hearted, emotionless...

Kirk: Bones! On speaker, lieutenant.

Uhura: Aye, aye captain.

Uhura presses several mysteriously unmarked buttons on dashboard in seemingly random succession.

B.O.R.G {in chorus}: We are B.O.R.G! Regulation is futile. You will be assimilated. Your governments’ assets will be liquidated and merged with ours.

Spock: Captain, preliminary analysis indicates that that the B.O.R.G. vessel has warped with considerable speed from a nearby tax nebula.

Kirk: Our scanners can’t penetrate tax nebulas.

Spock: Precisely. Their shield harmonics also appear to be immune to standard regulatory framework phasers and will likely withstand full-strength government photon torpedoes as well. As you know, Starfleet’s standing orders are that we are to try every attempt to appease the B.O.R.G..

Cue dramatic harp music. Camera zooms in on Kirk’s sweaty brow as he ponders his next move.

Computer continues to read communiqué...

Computer:We be-lieve that an o-pen world e-con-omy based on mar-ket prin-ci-ples, e-ffect-ive reg-u-la-tion, and strong gal-act-ic ins-ti-tu-tions will en-sure a sus-tain-able gal-act-i-sation with ri-sing pros-per-ity for all. We are de-ter-mined to re-store growth now, re-sist pro-tec-tion-ism, and re-form our mar-kets and our in-sti-tu-tions for the fu-ture. We have a-greed ac-tions to meet these cha-llen-ges as part of an in-te-gra-ted stra-te-gy that will re-store con-fi-dence and en-sure a last-ing gal-actic re-cov-ery. We are de-term-ined to en-sure that this cri-sis is not re-peat-ed.

Kirk: Lieutenant get us out of here.

Sulu: Aye, aye sir!

Sulu attempts to navigate away from the oncoming B.O.R.G vessel, but the viewer shows the cube still heading straight for them.

Sulu: Captain, warp drives are offline. Impulse engines won’t get us out of the way quickly enough.

Captain Kirk presses intercom to communicate with Chief Engineer Scott in the engine room.

Kirk: Scotty, I need warp speed now!

Scott: I’m sorry sir, but I’ve given ye all she’s got! She’s barely held it together since that run in we had back in the Seattle System. And then there was the near miss we had with the Starship Enron and that dot.com supernova, not ta mention the Ponzi mishap on the Madoff meteor...

Kirk: No need to remind me... Scotty, can’t you boost the economic growth flux capacitors?

Scott: Well, I can give ye a wee bit more, aye, but she canna take much more of this.

Kirk: Do your best Mr Scott.

Scott: Aye, aye sir. {sighs}

Mr Scott shakes head at the futility of it all.

Computer continues to read...

Computer: Re-stor-ing glo-bal growth now... Our cen-tral banks have al-so tak-en ex-cep-tion-al ac-tion, cut-ting in-ter-est rates ag-gres-sive-ly and close to ze-ro in ma-ny ad-vanced e-con-om-ies. Our cen-tral banks have pledged to main-tain ex-pansion-ary pol-ic-ies as long as need-ed, us-ing the full range of mon-e-tary pol-icy in-stru-ments, in-clu-ding un-con-vent-ion-al po-li-cy in-strum-ents, con-sist-ent with price sta-bi-lity.

Scott: Sir, we’ve just lost primary and secondary fiscal thrusters. The dilithium crystal reserve funds are nearly depleted.

Chekov: Captain, the B.O.R.G wessel has launched a wolley of toxic assets at us.

Kirk: Evasive manoeuvres.

Camera view tilts to make it appear ship is tilting despite being in space and therefore having no up or down to speak of...

Chekov: No good, Captain.

Kirk: Brace for impact.

Starship Capitalist Enterprise is hit by B.O.R.G toxic assets. Some personnel fall over. Lights flicker.

Kirk: Damage report.

Spock: Substantial parts of the lower housing decks have defaulted.

Kirk to security officer Bail’iff: Send a security team down to evict, er, I mean evacuate, the worst affected.

Security officer Bail’iff: Right away, Sir!

Sulu: Captain, I'm detecting a sudden drop of energy in the cube’s main lending array.

Kirk: Spock?

Spock: Scanning... confirmed. Captain, perhaps if we can inject a stimulus package into the B.O.R.G vessel’s power core, we may be able to amplify its lending beacon and thereby restabilise our own energy banks. This may help to appease them.

McCoy: That’s insane!

Spock: Insane, no. Illogical, maybe...

Kirk: Bones, we don’t really have any other options.

Scott{on the intercom}: Captain!

Kirk: Yes Scotty?

Scott: Captain, that last barrage of toxic assets has crippled four of our main energy banks. One more direct hit and we’ll be dead in the water!

Kirk: Mr Scott, can’t we renationalise?

Scott: I’m afraid we’ve already renationalised the lot of them, but we’ve been leaking plasma pensions and birilium bonuses which have depleted our reserves, not ta mention our galactic approval ratings...

Kirk: Understood, Mr Scott. See what you can do. Mr Chekov, fire a stimulus package into the main lending array of the B.O.R.G cube.

Chekov: Aye, aye Captain! Firing a 700 billion pound package now.

McCoy: Jim, you better come down to sick bay so I can have your head examined!

McCoy leaves the bridge in a huff. Stimulus package is fired at B.O.R.G. cube.

Computer continues in background...

Computer: We are ta-king com-pre-hen-sive ac-tion to strength-en our fi-nan-cial ins-ti-tu-tions in or-der to re-store do-mes-tic len-ding and in-ter-na-tion-al ca-pi-tal flows. We have made a-vail-able o-ver [$x trillion] of sup-port to our ban-king sys-tems to pro-vide li-quid-ity, re-cap-i-tal-ise fin-an-cial in-sti-tu-tions, and ad-dress the pro-blem of im-paired ass-ets.

Spock: Scanners indicate the cube has absorbed the package successfully, but there appears to be no effect on the B.O.R.G lending array.

Kirk: Damn!

Computer: We are com-mit-ted to take all ne-ces-sa-ry act-ions to re-store the flow of cre-dit through the fin-an-cial sys-tem and en-sure the sound-ness of sys-tem-i-cal-ly im-por-tant in-sti-tu-tions, act-ing with-in the a-greed G-20 Frame-work for Re-stor-ing Len-ding. These mea-sures un-der-pin and streng-then the im-pact of our fis-cal and mon-e-ta-ry po-li-cy act-ions.

Chekov: Captain, we appear to be caught in some kind of tractor beam. We can’t break free and we are stuck in our current trajectory!

Spock {with raised eyebrow}: Fascinating!

Kirk: Yes, Mr Spock, very fascinating. Now anyone else got any bright ideas?

Computer: We will en-sure these re-sour-ces can be used e-ffect-ive-ly to meet the needs of e-merg-ing and de-vel-op-ing coun-tries. The In-ter-gal-act-ic Mon-e-ta-ry Fund should im-ple-ment ra-pid-ly its new Flex-i-ble Cre-dit Line for coun-tries with strong po-li-cies and its re-formed len-ding and con-di-tion-al-i-ty frame-work. It should al-so dou-ble acc-ess to its low in-come coun-try fa-cil-i-ties.

Sulu: Sir, we could try the Structural Adjustment Proton beam on a nearby inhabited planet. It won’t solve the intergalactic economic crisis, but it might at least distract the B.O.R.G. for awhile.

Kirk: Very well Mr Sulu, target the Southern parts of the planet and areas where their shields and technology are least developed. Fire at will!

Sulu: Targetting... firing SAP beams.

Camera pans out to view Starship Capitalist Enterprise firing its SAP beams. The planet below shudders...

Spock: No effect captain.

Kirk: Damn!

Uhura: Captain, message from Starfleet.... we are instructed to continue expending our reserve energy banks and attempt to power up the B.O.R.G. cube’s lending array at all costs.

Kirk: Acknowledged. Uhura, open a hailing frequency.

Uhura: Channel open, Sir!

Kirk {to B.O.R.G.}: This is Captain James T Kirk of the Starship Capitalist Enterprise, we mean you no harm. Our orders are to assist you in repairing your lending array.

B.O.R.G. {in chorus}: We are B.O.R.G.! Regulation is futile. You will be assimilated...

Chekov: Captain, the B.O.R.G. tractor beam has gotten stronger since we fired the stimulus package at it. We’ll never be able to change course heading! All we can do now is fire the rest of our reserves at it.

Kirk: Damn! Don’t they realise we are trying to help them?! Computer, any clues from the communiqué that might help us?

Computer churns typewriter sounds.

Computer: Ne-ga-tive!

Spock: Captain. It appears the leaders have decided to do more of the same. This is very illogical.

Dramatic harp music plays in background.

Chekov: Captain, the Romulan and Klingon wessels are breaking orbit from planet g20.

Kirk: Well, it would appear that Praetor Sarkozy has eaten enough Gagh for one lifetime.

Spock raises eyebrow.

Spock: Captain, there may be a chance...

Kirk: Spock, I'm listening.

Spock: Jim, if we can get close enough to the B.O.R.G. vessel and set the ship to self-destruct, we may at least be able to save the élite few on planet G20 though at the expense of billions of galactic citizens.

Kirk: The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many?

Spock: Yes, it would appear that the laws of logic do not apply to Capitalism. Perhaps I should report to sick bay?

Kirk: No, you're right. The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. How human of you Spock!

Spock: No need to insult me Sir!

Uhura: But sir, shouldn’t we instead be looking at trying to close the tax nebulas, regulate the B.O.R.G., invest in green jobs for the masses and restructure the galactic economy so that trade and investment policies benefit the vast majority of people? You know, Put People First!?

B.O.R.G. {in chorus}: We are B.O.R.G.! Regulation is futile...

Sulu: Sir, the cube is powering up its hedge fund fusion array and currency speculation canons!

Kirk: Uhura, what have I told you about bringing up those ridiculous Communist ideas?

Uhura: But Sir!

Uhura shakes head in disapproval.

Computer: These ac-tions to-ge-ther con-sti-tute the lar-gest fis-cal and mo-ne-tar-y sti-mu-lus, the most com-pre-hen-sive sup-port pro-gramme for the fi-nan-cial sec-tor, and the grea-test mob-il-isa-tion of re-sour-ces to sup-port glo-bal fi-nan-cial flows in mo-dern times. Our ob-ject-ive is that they will en-able the glo-bal e-con-omy to ex-pand by [x] by the end of 20-10. We have ta-ken and will con-ti-nue to take the mea-sures ne-ces-sa-ry to de-li-ver this out-come. We call on the I-M-F to ass-ess reg-u-lar-ly the ac-tions ta-ken and the ac-tions re-qui-red.

Uhura {gleefully}: Sir, message from Starfleet! They report that tens of thousands of galactic citizens have gathered around planet G20 and are protesting against the summit and baking cake!

Kirk: Let them eat cake Uhura!

Uhura {rolling eyes}: Aye, Sir!

Computer: Intruder alert!

Spock: Captain, several B.O.R.G. have beamed aboard the Capitalist Enterprise and appear to be assimilating the remainder of our crew.

Kirk: I knew we should have fired them all before things got out of hand!

Spock: Sir, with the B.O.R.G. lending array hobbled, the Capitalist Enterprise stands no chance.

Kirk: Don’t you think I know that? Well, it seems our only hope now is that the planet Doha negotiations lead to an expansion of the Neutral Free Trade Zone. Chekov, set the ship to self-destruct, and don’t tell me ‘I told you so!’, Uhura.

Chekov: Aye, Captain. It’s been an honour serving with you on this wessel Sir!

As Chekov initiates self-destruct, Uhura transmits sensitive documents to activist organisations in the hopes that it may prove useful to the resistance. B.O.R.G. drones continue to assimilate crew members at an alarming rate. The galactic economic crisis looms as divisions between the Romulans, Klingons and Federation lead to further chaos. The computer reads out the final words of the communiqué as the valiant crew of the Starship Capitalist Enterprise hang on in hope that some succour may be derived from its historic message.

Computer: De-li-ver-ing our com-mit-ments: We a-greed to meet a-gain be-fore the end of this year to re-view pro-gress on our com-mit-ments.

Spock raises eyebrow. Bridge crew is stunned and shocked.

Kirk: That’s it?!

Spock: That is most illogical. Might this be a good time for a colourful metaphor Sir?

Kirk: Damn!

Self-destruct countdown reaches zero just as B.O.R.G. drones enter bridge to assimilate the last of the Capitalist Enterprise’s intrepid crew. Camera pans to exterior of ship just as it explodes taking out the B.O.R.G. cube with it.

Many citizens of the galaxy rejoice, live long and prosper. Much cake is eaten.

Cue closing credits and operatic yet loungy 1960s-esque theme music.

Stay tuned next time for Star Trek Episode 2: The Wrath of Dow

THE END

Facing an impasse in their intelligencegathering activities in Afghanistan, the CIA have resorted to more potent methods for acquiring Bin Laden's whereabouts. Having found that traditional methods of bribery and ‘persuasion’ weren't getting them the results they desired, agents have found that the sex wonder-drug Viagra is proving a big hit with the warlord set.

According to The Washington Post, agents have found particular success with ageing male clan leaders, many of whom have multiple younger wives. After the benefits of the pills were explained and offered, CIA spooks would come back several days later with the newly invigorated elders beaming and eager to help.

CIA agents have a long history of bribery in the region, having originally recruited insurgents to fight against the then Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with machine guns, grenade launchers and money. But they are now finding it difficult to get their expense claims approved when trying to arm battlehardened warlords with further US military surplus. This may have something to do with the fact that those same weapons are now being used on US forces, or maybe it’s just because the economic crisis means arms giveaways are not as easy to come by. Either way, more creative solutions are now required.

‘Whatever it takes to make friends and influence people – whether it’s building a school or handing out Viagra,’ one CIA official told The Washington sPost. He went on to say that the blue pills could put chieftains ‘back in an authoritative position’.

Quite...

True tales of a mixed-up world

As the US elections are almost upon us, our team is watching intently to find out who is going to be the next source of Seriously column fodder for the next four years. In the meantime, there is a rich vein of pre-election posturing and gaffes and general scariness that we can, and shall, shamelessly mine.

Palin is on a mission from God

‘Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending soldiers out on a task that is from God.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EgwoWVNoic

McCain offers his wife to topless beauty contest

‘I told her [that] with a little luck, she could be the only woman to serve as both the First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOkPFtPHpy4

Obama sees dead people

‘On this Memorial Day, as our nation honours its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today – our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh6Gx1KrvTw

Biden puts foot in it

‘I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.’

http://tinyurl.com/3qc4eu

If you live in Britain or read the British media, you would have no doubt heard about the controversy surrounding the broadcast of The Russell Brand Show on Radio 2 which has dominated the headlines for nearly two weeks now. Brand and his guest, fellow comedian and broadcaster Jonathan Ross, had obtained the mobile phone number of veteran comedian and actor Andrew Sachs who was due to appear on the same show, but hadn’t shown up. Sachs is much loved by the British public for his role as the waiter Manuel in the 1970s hit show Fawlty Towers. Brand and Ross proceeded to leave messages on Sachs’ answering machine that were perceived by many to be rude and obnoxious including comments about Sachs’s grandaughter, burlesque dancer Georgina Baillie, who later admitted to having slept with Brand. So far, so yawnworthy. In fact, only two people had bothered to complain to the BBC after the show was broadcast.

Then the story was picked up by the British tabloid media and soon people who hadn’t even heard the show and never listen to it started to complain about the program. The BBC is said to have received over 30,000 complaints at the time of this writing. The media has been obsessed with the story for the last week, with news of financial crisis, US elections, earth-shattering profits by oil companies while the Arctic ice thins, and wars for even more oil all but superseded by this storm in a teacup.

Heads are rolling. Brand has quit, Ross is on three-month suspension and the Radio 2 controller, Lesley Douglas, has resigned. Ofcom and the BBC are conducting more reviews and presumably some program editors and staff will also be nudged out or taking up new careers in the mailroom.

So who’s complaining? One group are the tabloid readers who probably haven’t heard the show, loved Fawlty Towers and the bumbling Manuel, and hate paying taxes. Point out to them that their tax money is used to pay the salaries of the likes of Ross and Brand, and you’ve got an instant-mix mob replete with torches and pitchforks at the ready to skewer the Beeb on sight.

Another group are typically older people who are confounded by the crudity of youth culture and think the BBC should only be about the Proms and period drama. Radio 4 broadcast several phone-in complaints this morning – many with a distinctly posh accent and a propensity to overuse the adjectives ‘awfully’ and ‘frightfully’ in their sentences. For them, Brand and Ross represent the crassness of the ‘lower cultures’ owing to their distinctly un-posh accents and sometimes oversexed repertoire.

Then there’s the politicians, from all sides, eager to get the financial crisis out of the headlines and attempt to make themselves appeal to the populace. Prime Minister Gordon Brown weighed in by admonishing Ross and Brand’s ‘clearly inappropriate and unacceptable behaviour’ the very same week that his new Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Peter Mandelson, came under scrutiny for corruption allegations. Conservative party leader David Cameron cashed-in on the furore by insisting that more heads at the BBC needed to roll: ‘The BBC needs to be transparent about how it takes decisions and explain its decision-taking process so that everyone can see what more needs to be done.’ This, again, the same week his Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, faces similar allegations.

It bears repeating, that in the context of this huge row, we are witnessing one of the worst financial crises for decades, the ever-increasing threat of drastic climate change while oil companies rake-in record profits, and war in Iraq and Afghanistan. So when Gordon Brown insists, that the illegal invasion of Iraq, which has cost tens of thousands of lives and is paid for by the British taxpayer, is to ensure that ‘the new Iraqi democracy is properly safeguarded’ – where are the 30,000 complaints to the BBC when that that particular obscenity is broadcast on Newsnight?

Then there’s the question of Andrew Sachs who’s being treated as some sort of comedic royalty and therefore untouchable. Yes, Sachs was the butt of a crass joke. But he also traded on them himself. Let’s not forget that Señor Sachs made his name by playing the bumbling feckless Spanish waiter Manuel in Fawlty Towers who was regularly beaten and abused by John Cleese’s character Basil Fawlty owing to him being so dim. Despite his own direct experience of the Nazi-led persecution of his own family and his fellow Jews in his homeland Germany, he didn’t hesitate to trade in the comedic currency of negative stereotype in his portrayal of Spanish people as a dim-witted servant class. He is therefore no stranger to crude and tasteless comedy and should anyway know better than to chide others for indulging in the same.

BBC plc and ‘the secret people of England’?
Rival commercial companies and commercial media outlets smell blood. They resent the fact that the BBC, as a public service, gets license-fee money. It was Murdoch’s Sun newspaper which bought the exclusive interview with Sach’s grandaughter Georgina Baillie (who’s now contracted the help of celebrity publicist Max Clifford), and it is Murdoch’s Sky Television which is the main commercial satellite broadcaster in this country.

And then there’s the baying mob of right-wingers who are clamouring for this episode to be used as a springboard for full privatization of the BBC itself. The free-market think-tank, the Adam Smith Institute, could barely contain their glee: ‘The public is rightly outraged and as such it is the perfect time to consider reform.’ They propose a rapid privatization move, such that: ‘Within ten years the licence fee should be scrapped completely, with BBC Worldwide managing all of the BBC’s interests and the public liberated from paying for the abuses of oddities such as Brand and Ross.’

Richard Littlejohn, the noisy rightwing columnist for the Daily Mail, yesterday called for the Conservative Party to seize the moment and push for privatization of the BBC: ‘If the Tories could but see it, there’s a once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity here. The BBC is an ideal example of a nationalized industry which has grown bloated and lost sight of its remit.’ After ranting about how the health system, police services, waste collection and everything else should be privatized too– in classic righteous middle-England mode he concluded: ‘We don’t have to take it lying down. This has been a stunning victory for common decency over the self-appointed, self-obsessed, metropolitan narcissists who control so much of our public life. At last, the secret people of England have spoken.’

Russell Brand offered a brilliant retort to the Daily Mail’s incessant diatribes against him and Ross:

‘I would like to remind the Daily Mail that while it is a bit bad to leave a swearword on Andrew Sachs’ answer phone, what’s worse – leaving a swearword on Andrew Sachs’ answerphone or tacitly supporting Adolf Hitler when he took charge of the Third Reich?

‘When he became chancellor in the old late thirties the Daily Mail printed a letter from a lord going “this Hitler might be all right”. And once old black shirt Oswald Mosely came to prominence in this country the Daily Mail went, “Hurrah for our blackshirted chums”…

‘On one hand you have upset Manuel, on the other you have millions and millions of dead people supported by a powerful media institution.’

Hear, hear!

Short-selling has always been controversial in financial markets, largely because it is so difficult to control. When large multi-billion dollar funds get in on the act, the effects can be devastating. These funds bet on the losing prospects of a commodity or stock price which in turn drives other market actors to short sell and soon shares start plummeting causing further panic in the markets. Capitalism eating itself.

The problem of short selling has only recently been addressed by regulators. Last month in the UK, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has prohibited short-selling for 32 financial companies (mainly banks) so far, despite assuring the markets that, ‘we still regard short-selling as a legitimate investment technique in normal market conditions’. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has so far banned short-selling for hundreds of financial companies to stop their precipitous slide towards junk status. While the SEC still thinks short-selling plays ‘an important role’ in the market, it admits that, ‘there are circumstances in which short selling can be used as a tool to mislead the market’. Australia’s gone even further. The Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) has imposed a total ban of short-selling for all of the nearly 3000 companies in the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).

Using short-selling techniques and a keen insight into the nature of the derivatives market and the complex financial instruments now under much scrutiny, Lahde made a fortune for himself and his investors. His fund, at its height, was described by the Financial Times last year as ‘one of the world’s best-performing funds of all time’. Last year, Lahde made some prescient remarks about the financial system:

‘Our entire banking system is a complete disaster. In my opinion, nearly every major bank would be insolvent if they marked their assets to market.’

Last month, Lahde closed-up shop with one fund he setup specifically to bet against the credit quality of banks and brokers that were heavily dependent on the market in the now well known Credit Default Swaps, citing poor returns. He suggested that final returns for the fund would be up: ‘double digits – missed the triple or quadruple digits with this one’. However, analysts were worried about what Lahde’s latest fund closure said about the state of the financial system as a whole. The Financial Times columnist Tracy Alloway wrote just after news of the closure:

‘Hedgefunds are supposed to beat the market… If an investor like Lahde sees no way of them being able to do that in current circumstances, then we’re all in big trouble. Let’s hope then, that he’s just being a bit lazy.’

Sure enough, shortly after Lahde’s announcement, bank shares across the world freefalled further than they already had and massive bailouts were announced in many major economies. Now Lahde is bowing out of the fund management business, and his final missive is well worth a full read. It’s reproduced here in its entirety:

‘Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list those deserving thanks know who they are.

I will no longer manage money for other people or institutions. I have enough of my own wealth to manage. Some people, who think they have arrived at a reasonable estimate of my net worth, might be surprised that I would call it quits with such a small war chest. That is fine; I am content with my rewards. Moreover, I will let others try to amass nine, ten or eleven figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck. Appointments back to back, booked solid for the next three months, they look forward to their two week vacation in January during which they will likely be glued to their Blackberries or other such devices. What is the point? They will all be forgotten in fifty years anyway. Steve Balmer, Steven Cohen, and Larry Ellison will all be forgotten. I do not understand the legacy thing. Nearly everyone will be forgotten. Give up on leaving your mark. Throw the Blackberry away and enjoy life.

So this is it. With all due respect, I am dropping out. Please do not expect any type of reply to emails or voicemails within normal time frames or at all. Andy Springer and his company will be handling the dissolution of the fund. And don’t worry about my employees, they were always employed by Mr. Springer’s company and only one (who has been well-rewarded) will lose his job.

I have no interest in any deals in which anyone would like me to participate. I truly do not have a strong opinion about any market right now, other than to say that things will continue to get worse for some time, probably years. I am content sitting on the sidelines and waiting. After all, sitting and waiting is how we made money from the subprime debacle. I now have time to repair my health, which was destroyed by the stress I layered onto myself over the past two years, as well as my entire life — where I had to compete for spaces in universities and graduate schools, jobs and assets under management — with those who had all the advantages (rich parents) that I did not. May meritocracy be part of a new form of government, which needs to be established.

On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal. First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reigned in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government. Capitalism worked for two hundred years, but times change, and systems become corrupt. George Soros, a man of staggering wealth, has stated that he would like to be remembered as a philosopher. My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles. This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly. I believe there is an answer, but for now the system is clearly broken.

Lastly, while I still have an audience, I would like to bring attention to an alternative food and energy source. You won’t see it included in BP’s, “Feel good. We are working on sustainable solutions,” television commercials, nor is it mentioned in ADM’s similar commercials. But hemp has been used for at least 5,000 years for cloth and food, as well as just about everything that is produced from petroleum products. Hemp is not marijuana and vice versa. Hemp is the male plant and it grows like a weed, hence the slang term. The original American flag was made of hemp fiber and our Constitution was printed on paper made of hemp. It was used as recently as World War II by the U.S. Government, and then promptly made illegal after the war was won. At a time when rhetoric is flying about becoming more self-sufficient in terms of energy, why is it illegal to grow this plant in this country? Ah, the female. The evil female plant — marijuana. It gets you high, it makes you laugh, it does not produce a hangover. Unlike alcohol, it does not result in bar fights or wife beating. So, why is this innocuous plant illegal? Is it a gateway drug? No, that would be alcohol, which is so heavily advertised in this country. My only conclusion as to why it is illegal, is that Corporate America, which owns Congress, would rather sell you Paxil, Zoloft, Xanax and other additive drugs, than allow you to grow a plant in your home without some of the profits going into their coffers. This policy is ludicrous. It has surely contributed to our dependency on foreign energy sources. Our policies have other countries literally laughing at our stupidity, most notably Canada, as well as several European nations (both Eastern and Western). You would not know this by paying attention to U.S. media sources though, as they tend not to elaborate on who is laughing at the United States this week. Please people, let’s stop the rhetoric and start thinking about how we can truly become self-sufficient.

With that I say good-bye and good luck.

All the best,

Andrew Lahde’