Sheffield Analysis Newswire Archive

Free Event 10.30 – 17.00 Saturday 24th November. Main Building, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham, B4 7ET

Get to grips with the basics of the financial crisis, and make links with other people from Birmingham and the West Midlands who want an economic system that puts people before profit.

If you want to understand how the global economy got into such a mess, and what to do about it this event is for you.

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Hi George

It's good to know that your email is intended in a 'friendly and constructive spirit'. We hope you will post a link to this response on your home page and via Twitter.

You write that Media Lens is a 'project whose purpose is to engage and persuade progressive journalists by critiquing their work and encouraging people to write to them'.

We do, of course, encourage readers to send polite emails to journalists. But our primary purpose is to raise public awareness by highlighting examples of corporate media bias. What people do with that awareness is really up to them. Our hope is that it feeds into activism, campaigning and the creation of non-corporate media like MediaBite, News Unspun and BS News.

Above all, we're trying to stimulate debate and participation. Engaging with journalists is certainly part of that, but we have few illusions about influencing media employees who often have little room for manoeuvre and who are deeply dependent on the corporate system. We do hope for marginal improvements as a direct result of our work - they do happen and do matter - but it's not a primary concern.

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Imagine if Iran -- or any other country -- did a fraction of what American and Israel do at will.

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The current crisis of capitalism has provoked protests, revolts and revolutions in major parts of the planet that include 3 billions of inhabitants. Even the mainstream Time Magazine made “The Protester” the person of the year. The caption on Time’s cover reads: From the Arab Spring To Athens, from Occupy Wall Street to Moscow. China, Chile, Spain, England, Italy, India, Israel, Iran and France, among many other places, can be added to Time’s hotbeds of recent social protests.

The protest movements have put alternatives to capitalism on the historical agenda (Hardt and Negri, 2011). This article argues that a section of knowledge workers have already created a new mode of production termed Peer to Peer Production (P2P) which is a viable alternative to capitalism. Although still in its emerging phase and dominated by capitalism, P2P clearly displays the main contours of an egalitarian society. The very fact that sections of P2P activists and ICT workers are also actively involved in the current protests may work as a good catalyst in connecting P2P to these movements.

In P2P production, producers collectively produce goods through voluntary participation in a de-centered, network-based production system. Volunteers choose the tasks they perform; the amount of time they spend on collective production; the place and time of their productive activity. In term of distribution, anyone in the world can use the products for free according to their own needs, regardless of their contribution (Benkler, 2006). This mode of production is very similar to what Marx (1978 a, 1978b) described as advanced communism. Therefore, it has also been called cyber communism (Kleiner, 2010; Barbrook, 2007; Moglen, 2003).

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Chairperson’s address:

Thank-you very much for coming today, to hear our presentation on The Historical Need for Communism.

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We look at the possible future interactions between society and computing technologies. We start with Gary Webb's story of how he used the WWW to circumvent censorship of his revelations of CIA drug dealing. Then we hear Cory Doctorow on corporations increasing interest in limiting the ways in which users use computing devices. In our second hour, Eben Moglen describes his work on 'freedom boxes', to create securely encrypted connections between individuals.

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The appalling massacre of 108 people, including 49 children, in Houla, Syria, dominated the Independent on Sunday’s latest front cover. Above a few short lines of commentary the banner headline read:

‘SYRIA: THE WORLD LOOKS THE OTHER WAY. WILL YOU?’

The text beneath observed:

‘There is, of course, supposed to be a ceasefire, which the brutal Assad regime simply ignores. And the international community? It just averts its gaze. Will you do the same? Or will the sickening fate of these innocent children make you very, very angry?’ (Independent on Sunday, May 27, 2012)

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On 19th May 2012 there was a half day gathering at the Quaker Meeting House in Sheffield made up of presentations and workshops around the theme of "An Economy for the 99%", it was organised by the World Development Movement in support of Occupy Sheffield and the Climate Caravan.

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“Our policy is to try to accelerate the arrival of that tipping point” at which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad is toppled, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman explained last March to the US Senate’s foreign relations committee.

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The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead -- because victory won’t come quickly -- it could prove a significant moment in American history.

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May Day statement of "Collective Action". In it we outline our analysis of the problems facing the anarchist movement in the UK and offer a call out to all independent anarchist communists to participate in our project to re-visit our political tradition, re-group and re-kindle our political action.

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Bobby Roberts and his sick and evil show is planning to slope off after willington in Durham and go to sedgefield racecourse
we URGE EVERYONE contact the race course demand they do not let bobby use there grounds

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Last year, the Occupy Movement rose up spontaneously in cities and towns across the country, radically shifted the discourse and rattled the economic elite with its defiant populism. It was, according to Noam Chomsky, “the first major public response to thirty years of class war.” In his new book, Occupy  https://www.alternet.org/alternetbooks/28/occupy/ , Chomsky looks at the central issues, questions and demands that are driving ordinary people to protest. How did we get to this point? How are the wealthiest 1 percent influencing the lives of the other 99 percent? How can we separate money from politics? What would a genuinely democratic election look like?

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This episode, a range of voices on the topic of wage slavery. In our first hour, a Wendell Berry reading, The Ecological Crisis as A Crisis of Character, a short video on fiat money, and A Brief History of Plutocracy by Robin Upton. In hour 2, the soundtrack of a video parable about big government, followed by continued reading of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.

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Focussing particularly on the Carlyle group, we look this week at the US Military-Industrial(-Congressional) Complex. First, we adapt for radio the 2004 video of Dan Briody's Iron Triangle - The Carlyle Group Exposed. Then, we adapt the more wide ranging 2010 documentary, Ethos, which looks at what is really going on in US behind the facade of democracy.

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This episode spins a wide range of voices into an exposé of the myth of urban decay. We begin with Steve Macek, then hear Dr. Gabor Maté on his experiences of 'drug addicts' in an inner city neighbourhood. Our longest piece is Ivan Illich speaking about water and the sense of smell.

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Dean Puckett and Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed discuss population and why it isn’t a main focus in the film, have an in-depth chat about Climate Skepticism and dissect KONY 2012 – Enjoy !

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During a screening of The Crisis of Civilization in Cambridge, Dean Puckett and Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed had a one hour, in-depth chat about the current situation in Syria, Libya and Iran – and about the West’s response to the Arab Spring.

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Radical and historical analysis, discussion, and film about the widespread riots across the UK last summer.

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We continue our look at the dark sides of the modern money system. We hear the documentary Christmas Unwrapped, on the pagan roots of the Christmas festival. We conclude Games with Sex and Death, chapter 6 of David Graeber's Debt, The First 5000 Years.

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