eveline lubbers on Fri, 8 Aug 2003 19:59:55 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Pandora Collected - August 8, 2003 |
Nettimers, some of you may be interested in the listserve I'm running, you'll find the latest issue below. Subscribe info is at: http://www.oudenaarden.nl/mailman/listinfo/pandora or just send an email to me: evel@xs4all.nl. (Note that the list-archive is missing updates since March, this will be repaired soon) gr eveline lubbers ---------------- Hi there, Pandora is back from it's summerbreak, ready to go on. Today a collection focussed on surveillance and repression of anti-corporate activism, private, by the state, or somewhere inbetween. By way of desert some news on brands, and the announcement of a book taking strategies further where No Logo stopped. For more information on the Washington right-wing thinktank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and their conference on tackling NGO's, dealt with in the latest Pandora Collected, see http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=NGOWatch.org Our friends at PR Watch have put all the available information together in their online wikipedia-encyclopedia The next issue of Pandora Collected will be devoted to Corporate Social Responsability. gr eveline 1. Walking a Thin Blue Line 2. Conflating protests with terrorism 3. Hangin' with the spies 4. Call for Beefed Up Corporate PR to Fight at Grassroots 5. Brands on the run 6. Announcement for a book called 'logo' ---------------------------------- 1. http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-militia25jul 25003420,1,1633823.story July 25, 2003 Walking a Thin Blue Line The 11-member Oregon Rangers say they help keep order in the forests. Officials don't want the armed group's assist but can't stop it. By Tomas Alex Tizon JUNCTION CITY, Ore. — He looks just like a cop, standing there in his blue uniform, the silver badge on his chest glinting in the sunlight. There's the gun too, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he keeps holstered on a thick black belt. Paul Ehrhardt, pausing in his driveway, identifies all the doodads on his belt: the extra bullet magazines, the pepper spray, the handcuffs — almost everything a cop needs in the field. Only Ehrhardt isn't a cop. And neither are the 10 other members of his group, which organized a year ago and has since roused alarm among the locals. The group — a motley collection of gun hobbyists, volunteer firefighters, outdoorsmen and ex-military men and their wives — calls itself the Oregon Rangers Assn. Their self-appointed mission is to help keep law and order in the forests. ---cut--- ------------------------ 2. Conflating protests with terrorism Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15150 06.13.03 - You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that [protest]. You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act." -- Mike Van Winkle, spokesperson, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) Under the guise of President Bush's all-consuming, yet amorphous, war against terrorism, police agencies across the country are spying and compiling dossiers on citizens exercising their constitutional rights. The Bush administration -- all war against terrorism, all the time -- has consistently supported policies and legislation allowing for the collection and cataloguing of data on the political, religious, or social views of individuals and organizations regardless of whether they present any imminent threat to the nation's safety. The administration has also spent obscene amounts of money to spy on its citizens while money for education and social services is drying up. ---cut--- ------------------------------ 3. Hangin' with the spies Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com 06.11.03 http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15139 (....) Given rapidly expanding post-9/11 police powers, and rampant stories of political activists across the country being the targets of "anti-terror" lists or investigations, the concern that brought hundreds onto downtown Seattle streets last week isn't fading soon. Given that the LEIU's sole purpose is to facilitate sharing of information amongst local police agencies, the LEIU is a natural target for questions and suspicion. It doesn't help that despite the dues from public law enforcement agencies, the LEIU itself is private and needs not tell anyone what it's up to. >From the LEIU perspective, it's all a misunderstanding. LEIU says it does not itself spy on anyone, or hold anyone else's files. Its 240 member agencies -- all of them state and local -- "collect their own information based on their legal parameters, whether it's local ordinances, state law, whatever it might be," Wright explains. "It's a pointer system. What they submit to LEIU is basic information regarding a subject that's involved or suspected of being involved in criminal activity....name, description, date of birth, identification, those sort of things." If Seattle police submit my name, and San Francisco police want information on me, what LEIU would give them, Wright says, is the name of the relevant Seattle investigator to call. The list of who to call about whom is kept by the California Department of Justice; there is no LEIU office, paid staff, or web site. ----cut---- ------------------ 4. Anti-Green PR Specialist Ross Irvine Calls for Beefed Up Corporate PR to Fight at Grassroots: Environmentalists win victory of unprecedented importance and magnitude: PR changed globally and forever http://www.epublicrelations.org/ Posted June 2003 Environmental activists have won a victory that's so stunning and far-reaching that even they are amazed. It's a win that -- over time -- will have an impact on PR across the United States, North America, and the entire world. Regardless of the business you're in -- biotechnology, banking, transportation, chemical, nuclear, mining or agriculture -- you will feel its influence. It will stifle innovation, creativity and progress in your company or organization. And, it will change the way you do PR on a day-to-day basis. On June 17, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted the precautionary principle as the basis for city and county policies. The precautionary principle is a notoriously vague and imprecise concept for which there are at least 23 definitions. One activist has said, "It (the precautionary principle) is a broad ethical principle. It can guide us all - workers and environmentalists - in a righteous fight against corporate greed." (....) The San Francisco situation illustrates one of the great differences between corporate and activist PR. Corporate PR folks are concerned about the business, the industry, the brand, the next news cycle and media relations. Activist PR folks are concerned about the environment in which business, industry, the brand, the news cycle and media relations are conducted. Corporate PR folks manage issues while activist PR folks manage the context in which issues occur. Put another way, activist PR folks deal with values and visions, corporate PR folks deal with things. ---cut--- ---------------------------- 5. BRANDS ON THE RUN http://www.msnbc.com/news/938263.asp With international opinion against the United States growing increasingly hostile and economic uncertainty looming at home, U.S. companies are becoming more worried about their appeal abroad. "In an annual survey conducted since 1998, RoperASW has been looking for a connection between the dwindling reputation of America and the worldwide appeal of its top brands, from Disney to Microsoft," Newsweek's Karen Lowry Miller reports. "It had found no such link until this year, when a survey of 30,000 consumers in 30 major economies found that those who felt an increasing alienation from American culture were also likely to report a growing disinclination to eat at McDonald's, or to buy Nike shoes. Most startling, 11 of the top 12 American multinationals saw falling or stagnant scores for 'brand power,' a measure of how well they are known and liked, while nine of the top 12 European and Asian ultinationals saw their scores rise," Miller writes. SOURCE: Newsweek, July 21, 2003 To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit: http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1058760000 -------------------------- 6. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 2 July 2003 M/C - Media and Culture is proud to present issue three in volume six of the award-winning M/C Journal http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ 'logo' - Edited by John Pace & Jason A. Wilson Ever since the printing press gave us the logotype (or since even earlier, when chattels and communiqués carried the owner's specific 'brand') symbols have been created to condense ideas and functions of ownership, advertisement, distinction and desire. In concert with the rise and proliferation of capitalism, the logo gained importance, to the point where contemporary western capital is primarily concerned with symbolic production. From a simple distinguishing mark, to seductive enticement, the logo now rides shotgun on the interface of contemporary capitalism. The prominence of the contemporary logo is evidenced by the attention given it in schools of management, design and cultural studies, by the feverish corporate work attendant upon brand maintenance, and not least by the recent focus by anti-capitalist movements on the logo as a ready symbol, and startling vulnerability, in the edifice of corporate capitalism. Naomi Klein's No Logo, a publishing sensation in 2000, gave a popular account of (and manifesto for) activism that focuses on the brand-driven multinational; groups like Adbusters modify advertisements to critical ends; boycotts and actions target particular logo-dependent corporations. More recently, though, the "logo-centric" approach embodied in such critiques and actions has been questioned for its effectiveness, and the quality of its analyses. It's not only other activists wondering whether all this reduces to a form of consumer sovereignty-style activism, but others who want to proclaim the aesthetic value and efficacy of the logo as a lubricant of flows and exchange. Is logo-based activism the new left-puritanism? Is it too unsystematic a critique to make real changes? Or is it the last, best chance to rally critique against an increasingly pervasive and dromocratic form of capital? Is the logo the brain-candy of consumerism, or the latest refinement of communicative (t)arts? The articles in this issue address a wide range of these issues. We invite you to explore the views of our contributors! Feature Article "Toywars" McKenzie Wark's feature article tells the story of etoy, the Swiss collective who through fortuity and their own taste for refusal were thrown into a confrontation with one of the brightest rising corporate stars of the e-commerce boom. Articles "An Interview with the Makers of Value-Added Cinema" by Danni Zuvela "Jamming at Work" by Susie Khamis "The Yes Men" by John Pace "Leggo My Logos: The Branding of Human Culture" by Douglas Rushkoff "What Fucked Version of Hello Kitty Are You?" by Lucy Nicholas "Postmodern Puma" by Andrew D. Grainger and David L. Andrews "Engaging Media Spectacle" by Douglas Kellner "On the Relentless Logic of the Logo-Sign" by Hélène Frichot "Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from Within" by Ned Rossiter "The Academic Logo" by Jeremy Hunsinger "Post-Logo" by Craig Bellamy ----------------------------------------------------------------- Pandora could not contain her curiousity and opened a forbidden box: all the evils of humanity flew out. Similarly, the Pandora Project intends to crack open the PR industry and spread its noxious secrets to people everywhere. Listinfo: http://www.oudenaarden.nl/lists/pandora/ Battling Big Business, Countering greenwash, front groups and other forms of corporate deception, for this book see http://www.evel.nl/pandora/bbb.htm # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net