| SAfrica school rethinks Israel ties | ||
University of Johannesburg threatens to sever ties with Israeli Ben-Gurion University if certain conditions are not met. Azad Essa Last Modified: 30 Sep 2010 01:21 GMT | ||
The South African University of Johannesburg (UJ) senate has threatened to end its relationship with the Israeli university, Ben-Gurion (BGU), unless certain conditions are met. In a statement released on Wednesday, the South African university's highest academic body said Ben-Gurion University would have to work with Palestinian universities on research projects and stop its "direct and indirect support for the Israeli military and the occupation". "The conditions are that the memorandum of understanding governing the relationship between the two institutions be amended to include Palestinian universities chosen with the direct involvement of UJ," the university said in a statement. "Should these conditions not be met within six months, the memorandum of understanding will automatically lapse on April 1 2011," UJ said. Describing the afternoon senate meeting on Wednesday as mostly "tense", the UJ senate also called on BGU to "respect UJ's duty (and) to take seriously, allegations of behaviour on the part of BGU's stakeholders that is incompatible with UJ's values". 'Human dignity' Adam Habib, the UJ's vice-chancellor told Al Jazeera that the decision was based on two principles. "Firstly it was important to identify with an oppressed population and secondly, it was about creating an enabling environment for reconciliation and the achievement of human dignity." Habib said his university will be engaging Palestinian academic institutions in a bid to solicit advice on mapping a way forward, and that the current memorandum of understanding (MOU) between UJ and Ben-Gurion would have to broaden. "For instance, we know that the BGU has collaborative projects with the Israeli army and we also know that the university implements state policy, which invariably results in the discrimination of the Palestinian people," Habib said. "Crucially, there can be no activities between UJ and an Israeli educational institution that discriminated against the Palestinian people." Habib said that while the decision still had to be ratified by the university council, these changes would have to happen over the next six months, or the existing MOU would collapse. Salim Vally, a senior researcher at the Faculty of Education and spokesman for the Palestinian Solidarity Committee (PSC), told Al Jazeera that the move to sever academic ties with BGU "has created an unprecedented momentum and has galvanised academics towards fighting for social justice". "While the PSC supports an unequivocal and unambiguous boycott of all Israeli state institutions, this is a move in the right direction and we are confident that it would lead to a more comprehensive boycott of Israel in the future. Relations between Ben-Gurion University and the University of Johannesburg, formerly the Rand Afrikaans University, a formerly all-white university under South Africa's apartheid system, began in The University of Johannesburg, created in 2005, took over various campuses including Rand Afrikaans University and a university in the black township of Soweto as part of efforts to ensure higher education was transformed with the rest of South Africa after the end of apartheid. The current partnership with Ben Gurion dates back to August 2009 when the universities signed an academic cooperation and staff exchange agreement, concerning water purification and micro-algal biotechnology research. The re-established relationship drew sharp criticism from the university community and catalysed the formation of a petition that has drawn some of the biggest academics, authors and social activists in South Africa. Desmond Tutu and around 250 other prominent South African academics have supported ending UJ's links with the Israeli institution. "Israeli universities are an intimate part of the Israeli regime, by active choice,'' Tutu wrote in an essay that appeared in a South African newspaper on Sunday. "While Palestinians are not able to access universities and schools, Israeli universities produce the research, technology, arguments and leaders for maintaining the occupation.'' Academic boycotts of Israeli universities have been inspired by boycotts of South African institutions during apartheid. Two years later Britain's Association of University Teachers voted to boycott Israel's Haifa and Bar Ilan universities. That decision was overturned only a month later under fierce international pressure. The moves have prompted sharp criticism. Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz once threatened legal action that would "devastate and bankrupt'' anyone who boycotts Israeli universities. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League described the British moves as anti-Semitic, arguing Israel was being singled out while human rights violators such as Iran, Sudan, Venezuela and Zimbabwe were ignored. |
October 2, 2010
Do the right thing, U of Johannesburg!
Amazed but not surprized
| US 'sorry' over syphilis experiment | |||||
President Obama apologises to Guatemalan counterpart over tests that deliberately infected hundreds of people in 1940s. Last Modified: 02 Oct 2010 03:06 GMT | |||||
Barack Obama has personally apologised "for all those affected" in a US-led study that deliberately infected hundreds of prisoners, soldiers and mental patients in Guatemala with sexually-transmitted diseases. The US president telephoned Alvaro Colom, his Guatemalan counterpart, offering deep regret for the experiment conducted by US health researchers in the Latin American nation in the 1940s. Obama and other US officials voiced their outrage over the "reprehensible research", in which hundreds of people were infected with gonorrhea or syphilis and then allowed them to have unprotected sex. "This is shocking, it's tragic, it's reprehensible," Robert Gibbs, a White House spokesman, said. Obama vowed that all human medical studies conducted today would be held to exacting US and international legal and ethical standards. Gruesome crime In an impromptu news conference in Guatemala on Friday, Colom denounced the study and said he was told of the gruesome years-long experiment by Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state.
However, he acknowledged that the experiments were not the actions of those in power now. Clinton called Colom to express her deep regret, saying the injection of Guatemalan citizens was "clearly unethical". "Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health," Clinton said in a joint statement with Kathleen Sebeliu, the health human services secretary. "We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologise to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices." Clinton said a thorough investigation was under way and that current regulations would prevent any repeat of similar experiments. The federal-funded experiment, which ran from 1946 to 1948, was discovered by Susan Reverby, a Wellesley College medical historian, who stumbled upon archived documents on it. It apparently was conducted to test whether penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infection with sexually transmitted diseases. "When few of these men became infected, the research approach changed to direct inoculation of soldiers, prisoners and mental hospital patients," background documents on the study show.
A total of some 1,500 people took part in the study, which lay hidden for decades. The research was led by John Cutler, a US public health doctor, who was involved in the highly-controversial Tuskegee experiment from 1932 to 1972. In that study scientists tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had late-stage syphilis but who did not know it, and were never given remedial treatment. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US government body that funded the study, called it "deeply disturbing" and "an appalling example in a dark chapter in the history of medicine". Collins said the US surgeon-general in the 1940s, Thomas Parran, appeared to have been aware of the experiment, as were "components" of the Guatemalan government at the time. He said independent experts under the umbrella of the US Institute of Medicine will conduct a fact-finding probe of the Guatemala study. The US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will convene international experts to review standards surrounding human medical research, he added. |
October 1, 2010
Youth - is this our future under capitalism?
Seniors at risk in retirement home, investigation reveals
October 01, 2010
Dale Brazao and Moira Welsh
The 82-year-old man, in diapers and suffering advanced dementia, slid off his chair and crashed to the floor of the Toronto retirement home.
No staffer came to help. An undercover Toronto Star reporter helped Sam up and waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. At twenty minutes a tired, overworked staffer appeared.
“Sam does not belong here,” she said.
That was our first night inside In Touch Retirement Living in Toronto’s west end at Lawrence Ave. and Weston Rd. Over the next week, the Star witnessed profound neglect in a place where more than half of the 18 residents should be in a nursing home receiving higher quality, regulated medical care.
People left in urine and feces-filled diapers for hours. Washrooms with no toilet paper so residents, some suffering from dementia, wiped themselves with their hands or a flimsy communal towel. No stimulation. Bad food. Poorly trained and underpaid staff, with just one on duty overnight.
While one reporter investigated from the inside, another delved into management of the home owned by Elaine Lindo. We found health records showing dangerous food preparation; court records detailing a confrontation that led to an assault allegation; and Lindo’s attempt to evict a resident who refused to pay a massive rent increase.
Lindo, in a brief interview, defended the home. “We are one of the best in the city and everybody knows that.” Lindo declined many requests for a full interview. She also did not answer written questions.
The story of this home is played out more and more across the province, where aging seniors are forcing a crisis. The Starfound that while the Liberal government’s upcoming plan to provide consumer protection may protect high functioning seniors who want to get a fair price for a haircut or other services in a home, it will do little to help people like Sam (names of residents have been changed to protect their privacy).
The Star found numerous problems at In Touch.
Public health records reveal a recent food safety conviction following two years of warnings. In August 2009, after discovering dirty kitchen conditions, along with beef stew and five dozen eggs stored on the counter instead of the refrigerator, the inspector laid three charges under the provincial Health Protection & Promotion Act.
“Leaving out hazardous food at room temperature allows bacteria to multiply very fast and that can turn into food poisoning which creates a lot of problems for the very young and the very old,” said Toronto public health manager Jim Chan.
Lindo pleaded guilty to one hazardous food charge this summer and was fined $250. The city prosecutor withdrew two other hygiene-related charges.
According to a Star data analysis of public health inspections on Toronto’s retirement homes, In Touch had the worst inspection results in the city since since Lindo bought the small home in August 2006.
Inspectors recorded 23 different violations since Lindo took over, including food risks, pest control (mouse droppings), lack of washroom supplies such as soap and paper towels for staff, inadequate lighting, and failure to properly sterilize utensils.
The Star’s undercover reporter lived in the houses for seven days and found that the food served never matched the printed menu posted on the wall. The menu portrayed a healthy diet of meat, fruits and vegetables. Instead, residents ate cheap, processed food with an occasional glimpse of protein.
Complaints from residents and families interviewed by the Star focused on the food, the cleanliness of the resident washrooms – none had toilet paper – and bullying tactics over money. The Star also found there were no programs for residents, just a television where the picture rarely matched the audio. Puddles of urine were left on the floor for more than 24 hours, cleaned only after the Star reporter complained it was a slipping hazard.
The fees at the home are low (roughly $1,200 per month for a bed in a double room) compared to upscale homes which charge about $6,000.
In 2009, home owner Lindo began proceedings to evict resident Nancy MacEachern, a 56-year-old woman sent to the retirement home by a hospital to recover from an illness.
MacEachern said her dispute with Lindo involved several attempts to raise her rent by $400 and the type of care she needed. Lindo took MacEachern to the provincial Landlord and Tenant Board to have her evicted.
According to MacEachern, Lindo told the board that she had been very good to MacEachern, helping her shower, comb her hair and walk down the stairs. MacEachern denied this, saying she had lived at In Touch for two years without receiving any extra help.
Earlier this year, the board dismissed the eviction application, and ruled Lindo’s description of care services was “not persuasive and trustworthy.”
MacEachern believes that Lindo also wanted her out because she sided with resident Caterina Pileggi over an incident that ended in assault charges against Lindo.
Lindo was found not guilty after a trial.
Police came to the home after a December 2008 argument in the kitchen with Pileggi, 74, a four-foot tall disabled woman who enjoyed cooking.
Pileggi told police that Lindo became angry at her for making too much chicken, and had pushed her. Police laid a second assault charge after Pileggi told them about a scuffle in her bedroom six months earlier, alleging that Lindo had smashed her hand against the door, causing deep bruising.
According to the trial transcript, Lindo denied both assaults. In the most recent assault allegation, Pileggi testified that Lindo pushed her in the shoulders, knocking her into the kitchen wall. A kitchen worker testified she saw Lindo hit Pileggi, but said it was on the forehead, which troubled the judge hearing the case.
Lindo told court the kitchen worker was a “pathological liar”, and said that Pileggi was violent, and sometimes wielded a knife.
Two of Lindo’s personal care workers testified on their boss’s behalf. They said Pileggi was aggressive, prone to swearing and violence.
Staff and residents at the home have told the Star they have concerns over the accuracy of the testimony provided by Lindo’s two workers. One staff member, who was not present when the alleged assault took place, told the Star’sundercover reporter that one of Lindo’s workers “saved Elaine” during the trial.
Justice Thomas Cleary said the case hinged on the reliability of the accused and the complainant. Cleary noted the evidence of Lindo’s witnesses and said he was left with a “reasonable doubt” about both assaults.
In the months leading up to the trial, Lindo was not allowed at the home. She returned there after she was cleared. MacEachern and two other residents moved to a retirement home down the street.
“It’s smaller, but we are also treated with respect,” MacEachern said.
The Star’s undercover reporter heard complaints from workers that they were paid as little as $5 an hour and made to work long shifts.
The Ontario Labour Relations Board found in July that former care worker Denise Ellis was paid $85 for a 12-hour shift — $7.72 an hour — below minimum wage during the time period ($8.75-$9.50).
The labour board ordered Lindo to pay $3,614 in back wages and public holiday pay. Lindo is appealing the decision.
Money is at the heart of another complaint, where Lindo is accused of cashing a dead woman’s rent cheque.
Dave Dineno said his mother, Nellie, 94, died on July 30. In his small claims court complaint, Dineno said he told Lindo not to cash the $1,177 rent cheque for August and said she told him, “I don’t steal from the dead.”
In his complaint, Dineno said when he went to the home on August 4 to retrieve the cheque, Lindo told him that she had cashed it. Lindo, he said, then verbally attacked him, telling him that he “wanted his mother dead,” according to his claim.
In her statement of defence, Lindo’s lawyer said the Residential Tenancies Act allows her to charge a resident up to 30 days following a death. The case is still before the courts.
“It’s not that I can’t live without the money,” Dineno said, during an interview. “It’s the principle. And it’s the cheapness of the way this place operates, and how it affects everyone. My Mom used to call me and say ‘Dave, Dave, I need to go to the washroom but there is no toilet paper here. Can you please bring me some toilet paper?’”
Data analysis by Andrew Bailey
Moira Welsh can be reached at (416) 869-4073 or mwelsh@thestar.ca
Dale Brazao can be reached at (416) 869-4433 or dbrazao@thestar.ca
WFDY on Ecuador
Solidarity with Ecuador!
The World Federation of Democratic Youth has received the news of the attempted coup d’etat that is taking place in Ecuador by the police forces, the air force and the patriotic forces lead by Lucio Gutierrez, attempting to defeat the process of change that has been taking place in the country.
We are facing an attempt to repeat what took place in Honduras and we are sure that it is the US imperialism, hand by hand with the submissive bourgeoisie of the country, that is behind all these maneuvers to destroy the process of change lead by President Correa.
WFDY expresses it total rejection and condemnation of this attempt of coup d’etat and underlines its full support to the Ecuadorian government, calling upon all its member and friendly organizations to join the worldwide solidarity and demonstrate in front of all Ecuadorian embassies in support of the Citizen Revolution lead by President Correa and the people of Ecuador that struggles to build a better society with wide participation of all!
September 30, 2010
Chavez Condemns 'Coup Attempt' On Ecuador's Correa
By Dan Molinski Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
CARACAS (Dow Jones)--Venezuela President Hugo Chavez on Thursday condemned a "coup attempt" on Ecuador President Rafael Correa and said the fellow leftist leader is being held against his will.
"Correa's life is in danger ... he's been kidnapped," Chavez said in a telephone interview on state television. "Venezuela is with him."
Officials in Ecuador said Correa is in a military hospital, after being affected by tear gas.
Chavez said he's been in communication with Correa by telephone throughout the day and said he and other South American leaders are "mobilizing" to reject the coup attempt. Chavez said he's spoken with Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentina's leader, Cristina Fernandez.
Venezuela's president said he was preparing to leave immediately for Buenos Aires, Argentina, where an emergency meeting of Unasur would condemn the actions in Ecuador. Unasur is a loose union of about a dozen South American nations.
Correa says the protests in Ecuador Thursday are an attempt by the opposition to destabilize his government.
The government declared a five-day state of emergency, mobilizing armed forces to guarantee order after protests and strikes led by police and some military officials. The protesters are unhappy with a planned cut in benefits.
Chavez' first public announcement on the unrest in Ecuador came via his Twitter account.
"They're trying to take down President Correa," Chavez said on the social-networking site, where he has about 900,000 followers. "Long live Correa."
Activism debate - social media
From the new yorker
ANNALS OF INNOVATION
SMALL CHANGE
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm GladwellOCTOBER 4, 2010
Social media can’t provide what social change has always required.
- KEYWORDS
- Twitter;
- Facebook;
- Civil-Rights Movement;
- Revolutions;
- Activists, Activism;
- Iran;
- Technology
t four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away.
“I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
“We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move. Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty. By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas. “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized. These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.
he world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”
These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
reensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later. On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.
The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee recruited hundreds of Northern, largely white unpaid volunteers to run Freedom Schools, register black voters, and raise civil-rights awareness in the Deep South. “No one should go anywhere alone, but certainly not in an automobile and certainly not at night,” they were instructed. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out. Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.
What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,” he concluded. What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.
This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena. The opposition movement in East Germany consisted of several hundred groups, each with roughly a dozen members. Each group was in limited contact with the others: at the time, only thirteen per cent of East Germans even had a phone. All they knew was that on Monday nights, outside St. Nicholas Church in downtown Leipzig, people gathered to voice their anger at the state. And the primary determinant of who showed up was “critical friends”—the more friends you had who were critical of the regime the more likely you were to join the protest.
So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School. The four would smuggle beer into the dorm and talk late into the night in Blair and McNeil’s room. They would all have remembered the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott that same year, and the showdown in Little Rock in 1957. It was McNeil who brought up the idea of a sit-in at Woolworth’s. They’d discussed it for nearly a month. Then McNeil came into the dorm room and asked the others if they were ready. There was a pause, and McCain said, in a way that works only with people who talk late into the night with one another, “Are you guys chicken or not?” Ezell Blair worked up the courage the next day to ask for a cup of coffee because he was flanked by his roommate and two good friends from high school.
he kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.
In a new book called “The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change,” the business consultant Andy Smith and the Stanford Business School professor Jennifer Aaker tell the story of Sameer Bhatia, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur who came down with acute myelogenous leukemia. It’s a perfect illustration of social media’s strengths. Bhatia needed a bone-marrow transplant, but he could not find a match among his relatives and friends. The odds were best with a donor of his ethnicity, and there were few South Asians in the national bone-marrow database. So Bhatia’s business partner sent out an e-mail explaining Bhatia’s plight to more than four hundred of their acquaintances, who forwarded the e-mail to their personal contacts; Facebook pages and YouTube videos were devoted to the Help Sameer campaign. Eventually, nearly twenty-five thousand new people were registered in the bone-marrow database, and Bhatia found a match.
But how did the campaign get so many people to sign up? By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf. You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and—in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need—spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.
The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.
he students who joined the sit-ins across the South during the winter of 1960 described the movement as a “fever.” But the civil-rights movement was more like a military campaign than like a contagion. In the late nineteen-fifties, there had been sixteen sit-ins in various cities throughout the South, fifteen of which were formally organized by civil-rights organizations like the N.A.A.C.P. and CORE. Possible locations for activism were scouted. Plans were drawn up. Movement activists held training sessions and retreats for would-be protesters. The Greensboro Four were a product of this groundwork: all were members of the N.A.A.C.P. Youth Council. They had close ties with the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. They had been briefed on the earlier wave of sit-ins in Durham, and had been part of a series of movement meetings in activist churches. When the sit-in movement spread from Greensboro throughout the South, it did not spread indiscriminately. It spread to those cities which had preëxisting “movement centers”—a core of dedicated and trained activists ready to turn the “fever” into action.
The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism. It was also, crucially, strategic activism: a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline. The N.A.A.C.P. was a centralized organization, run from New York according to highly formalized operating procedures. At the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the unquestioned authority. At the center of the movement was the black church, which had, as Aldon D. Morris points out in his superb 1984 study, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” a carefully demarcated division of labor, with various standing committees and disciplined groups. “Each group was task-oriented and coordinated its activities through authority structures,” Morris writes. “Individuals were held accountable for their assigned duties, and important conflicts were resolved by the minister, who usually exercised ultimate authority over the congregation.”
This is the second crucial distinction between traditional activism and its online variant: social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
This structure makes networks enormously resilient and adaptable in low-risk situations. Wikipedia is a perfect example. It doesn’t have an editor, sitting in New York, who directs and corrects each entry. The effort of putting together each entry is self-organized. If every entry in Wikipedia were to be erased tomorrow, the content would swiftly be restored, because that’s what happens when a network of thousands spontaneously devote their time to a task.
There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?
The Palestine Liberation Organization originated as a network, and the international-relations scholars Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones argue in a recent essay in International Security that this is why it ran into such trouble as it grew: “Structural features typical of networks—the absence of central authority, the unchecked autonomy of rival groups, and the inability to arbitrate quarrels through formal mechanisms—made the P.L.O. excessively vulnerable to outside manipulation and internal strife.”
In Germany in the nineteen-seventies, they go on, “the far more unified and successful left-wing terrorists tended to organize hierarchically, with professional management and clear divisions of labor. They were concentrated geographically in universities, where they could establish central leadership, trust, and camaraderie through regular, face-to-face meetings.” They seldom betrayed their comrades in arms during police interrogations. Their counterparts on the right were organized as decentralized networks, and had no such discipline. These groups were regularly infiltrated, and members, once arrested, easily gave up their comrades. Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.
The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy. The Montgomery bus boycott required the participation of tens of thousands of people who depended on public transit to get to and from work each day. It lasted a year. In order to persuade those people to stay true to the cause, the boycott’s organizers tasked each local black church with maintaining morale, and put together a free alternative private carpool service, with forty-eight dispatchers and forty-two pickup stations. Even the White Citizens Council, King later said, conceded that the carpool system moved with “military precision.” By the time King came to Birmingham, for the climactic showdown with Police Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor, he had a budget of a million dollars, and a hundred full-time staff members on the ground, divided into operational units. The operation itself was divided into steadily escalating phases, mapped out in advance. Support was maintained through consecutive mass meetings rotating from church to church around the city.
Boycotts and sit-ins and nonviolent confrontations—which were the weapons of choice for the civil-rights movement—are high-risk strategies. They leave little room for conflict and error. The moment even one protester deviates from the script and responds to provocation, the moral legitimacy of the entire protest is compromised. Enthusiasts for social media would no doubt have us believe that King’s task in Birmingham would have been made infinitely easier had he been able to communicate with his followers through Facebook, and contented himself with tweets from a Birmingham jail. But networks are messy: think of the ceaseless pattern of correction and revision, amendment and debate, that characterizes Wikipedia. If Martin Luther King, Jr., had tried to do a wiki-boycott in Montgomery, he would have been steamrollered by the white power structure. And of what use would a digital communication tool be in a town where ninety-eight per cent of the black community could be reached every Sunday morning at church? The things that King needed in Birmingham—discipline and strategy—were things that online social media cannot provide.
he bible of the social-media movement is Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody.” Shirky, who teaches at New York University, sets out to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet, and he begins with the story of Evan, who worked on Wall Street, and his friend Ivanna, after she left her smart phone, an expensive Sidekick, on the back seat of a New York City taxicab. The telephone company transferred the data on Ivanna’s lost phone to a new phone, whereupon she and Evan discovered that the Sidekick was now in the hands of a teen-ager from Queens, who was using it to take photographs of herself and her friends.
When Evan e-mailed the teen-ager, Sasha, asking for the phone back, she replied that his “white ass” didn’t deserve to have it back. Miffed, he set up a Web page with her picture and a description of what had happened. He forwarded the link to his friends, and they forwarded it to their friends. Someone found the MySpace page of Sasha’s boyfriend, and a link to it found its way onto the site. Someone found her address online and took a video of her home while driving by; Evan posted the video on the site. The story was picked up by the news filter Digg. Evan was now up to ten e-mails a minute. He created a bulletin board for his readers to share their stories, but it crashed under the weight of responses. Evan and Ivanna went to the police, but the police filed the report under “lost,” rather than “stolen,” which essentially closed the case. “By this point millions of readers were watching,” Shirky writes, “and dozens of mainstream news outlets had covered the story.” Bowing to the pressure, the N.Y.P.D. reclassified the item as “stolen.” Sasha was arrested, and Evan got his friend’s Sidekick back.
Shirky’s argument is that this is the kind of thing that could never have happened in the pre-Internet age—and he’s right. Evan could never have tracked down Sasha. The story of the Sidekick would never have been publicized. An army of people could never have been assembled to wage this fight. The police wouldn’t have bowed to the pressure of a lone person who had misplaced something as trivial as a cell phone. The story, to Shirky, illustrates “the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause” in the Internet age.
Shirky considers this model of activism an upgrade. But it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.
Shirky ends the story of the lost Sidekick by asking, portentously, “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all#ixzz112gmDrZC
September 29, 2010
Ban Ki-moon highlights Cuba's achievements in Millennium Development Goals
Víctor M. Carriba
Granma International
UNITED NATIONS, September 22.—UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today described Cuba’s achievements in completing the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) as impressive.
Ban Ki-Moon expressed that recognition in a meeting with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who participated in the MDG Summit that ended on Wednesday.
Regarding those goals established in the year 2000 to be reached by 2015, both parties agreed on the need to strengthen political will in order to realize them, according to an official note circulated by the UN.
In the interview, Ban Ki-moon saluted the island’s impressive progress with respect to the MDGs, and expressed his appreciation for the aid that Cuba is giving Haiti, devastated by an earthquake this last January.
They also discussed climate change and other humanitarian issues, according to the release. (PL)
Nuclear Winter and Peace
More than 20,000 nuclear weapons are in the hands of eight countries —the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, India and Pakistan—, some of which have significant economic, political and religious differences.
The new START treaty, signed in Prague in April 2010 by the biggest nuclear powers, only represents an illusion with regards to the situation threatening humanity.
The nuclear winter theory, developed and brought to its current stage by the eminent researcher and professor from Rutgers University, New Jersey, Dr. Alan Robock (a modest scientist who prefers to recognize the merits of his colleagues rather than his own), has proven its veracity.
The theory postulates that the only way to prevent the use of nuclear weapons is by eliminating them. Living in a privileged place on the planet, which allows them to enjoy the highest standards of living and the world’s riches despite the their incredible waste of non-renewable resources, the American people should be the ones most interested in the information provided by the scientists. But how much time does the mass media devote to this task?
According to Robock, “If such weapons did not exist, they could not be used. And at present, there is no rational argument to use them at all. If they cannot be used, they must be destroyed and in this way we would protect ourselves from accidents, mistaken calculations or any bouts of insanity.”
“Computers that used ultramodern models became the only available laboratory, while historical events, including cities ravaged by fires caused by earthquakes and war time bombardments, smoke columns produced by forest fires, and clouds from volcanic eruptions, became the yardstick for scientific evaluations.”
The proliferation of nuclear weapons at a time when Israel, India and Pakistan have joined the nuclear club, and other countries aspire for membership, have forced Robock and his colleagues to review their initial research projects. The results of these revisions, published in recent articles, are astonishing.
While the United States and Russia each committed to reducing their operative nuclear arsenals down to some 2,000 weapons in April 2010 in Prague, the only way to prevent a global climate catastrophe from taking place would be by eliminating nuclear weapons.
“…any country that at present may be considering the nuclear option must acknowledge that by adopting such a decision, it would be endangering not only its own population but the entire world. It is time for the world to once again reflect upon the dangers of nuclear weapons, and this time follow the path to peace and eliminate the possibility of a global climate catastrophe induced by nuclear energy, for the first time since mid-last century.”
"... the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a total attack against an enemy would be a suicidal action due to anomalous cold and darkness caused by the smoke from the fires generated by the bomb. In fact, it has been evidenced that the more nuclear weapons a country possesses, the less secure it is."
Albert Einstein said: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Carl Sagan has said that our nuclear arms policy was “a path where no man thought.”
At the end of the lecture I asked Professor Alan Robock, “How many people in the world are familiar with this information?” He replied, “Very few.” I went on, “In your country, how many?” “The same,” he answered, “it is not known.”
I had no doubt that this was the sad reality, and added: “It makes no difference if we know about this, the world needs to know. Perhaps psychologists need to be brought in to explain why the masses do not understand.”
“I have an answer —said the scientist— it’s called denial. It is so horrible, that people do not want to think about it. It's easier to pretend it does not exist.”
During his nearly one-hour lecture, aided by charts, figures and photos projected on a screen, Robock’s words were clear, precise and eloquent. And I said: "What does it mean to raise awareness, which we talk so much about? What does it mean to create culture? And how discouraging it must be for you scientists that people don’t even know what you are doing; so many hours invested."
I told him that back then, when there was no radio, television or Internet, it was impossible to broadcast a lecture like this one taking place in Cuba or in the world. Much less when many people did not know how to read or write.
We promised the professor that we would spread the information he had provided us about the nuclear winter theory —a topic we know a little about due to our concern over the possible outbreak of a global nuclear war, a concern that drew us to his lecture— in a language that even eight-year old Cuban children could understand.
No other time in human history comes close to the present. Certainly, if these risks are not understood by those who make decisions in the heights of the immense power that science and technology have placed in their hands, the next world war will be the last one, and it would take, perhaps, tens of millions of years before new intelligent beings would attempt to write their history.
As chance would have it, yesterday, September 20, I received news that the Peace Boat passenger ship was to arrive in the Port of Havana at dawn on September 21 after being delayed several hours by cyclones on its voyage from the Canary Islands. The peace boat is a Non-Governmental Organization with Special Consultative Status to the United Nations. Since 1983, it has been organizing cruises around the world to promote peace, human rights, and the fair and sustainable development of the environment. In 2009 the organization was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for its global campaign to prevent war.
In a letter written to me by Peace Boat director Yoshioka Tatsuya and presented by Nao Inoue, the head of the group of visitors, Tatsuya states: “Our organization has been working for years, recently in cooperation with the ALBA countries […] which have clearly expressed their commitment to nuclear abolition, the prohibition of foreign military bases and peaceful resolutions for international controversies […] Japan, as you know, the only country that has endured an atomic bombardment, to this day maintains a pacifist Constitution that, by virtue of Article 9, formally renounces war and prohibits the use of force in international disputes…
“A focal issue in our activism is the removal of foreign military bases: a situation that affects Japan and several countries around the world. These foreign bases, such as the ones in Guantánamo and Okinawa, cause irreversible environmental damage and encourage war instead of world peace.
Including this voyage, Peace Boat has organized 70 trips around the world beginning in 1983 with the participation of no less than 40,000 people who have visited more than 100 countries. Their slogan is “Learn from Past Wars to Build a Future of Peace.”
Over 20 years, the Peace Boat has visited our country 14 times, overcoming obstacles and hurdles imposed by the United States. During this time it has promoted campaigns to raise significant amounts of money to donate towards the health and education sectors primarily. It is active in the numerous international forums and solidarity with Cuba gatherings. They are truly proven friends of our country. In May 2009, responding to a proposal by the Cuban Friendship with the Peoples Institute (ICAP), the organization was decorated with the Order of Solidarity granted by the Council of State of the Republic of Cuba.
It was a great honor for me to receive an invitation to meet with a group of the visitors which I proposed holding at the Havana Convention Center. Mr. Nao Inoue and Ms. Junko Watanabe both addressed participants. Junko Watanabe is a survivor who was just two-years-old when the first atomic bomb was launched on the city of Hiroshima. She was with her little brother in the yard of a house located 18 kilometers from the place where the bomb was dropped; an event that made the majority of the city vanish, instantly killing more than 100,000 people and seriously injuring the rest of the inhabitants.
Junko Watanabe shared her dramatic memories, when years after the attack, she saw the images and learned about the details of the bombing that caused so much suffering in so many innocent people who had nothing to do with that brutal event.
It was a deliberate act to terrorize the world with the unnecessary use of a weapon of mass extermination at a time when the Japanese empire was already defeated. The bomb was dropped, not on a military installation but rather a defenseless civilian objective. The images that documented that horrifying crime do not express what the voice of Junko Watanabe narrated about the events. The meeting was an opportune time to exchange our points of view and tell our friendly Japanese visitors —ardent combatants in the struggle to abolish nuclear arms, military bases and war— about the efforts carried out by our country to stop a nuclear conflict that could bring about an end to the existence of our species.
Fidel Castro Ruz
September 21, 2010
7:12 p.m.
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