-Caveat Lector- [radtimes] # 137 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to assist RadTimes--> (See ** at end.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --Police issue radar guns to civilian snoopers (UK) --"WBAI: The Democratic Party's Newest Target" --Trust Us, We're Experts --The left is right? --MOVIE: Traffik/Traffic --Supreme Ironies: No Closure, No Peace --Great countercoup strategies & Anti-bush Links --U.S. approves high-resolution spying by commercial satellites =================================================================== Police issue radar guns to civilian snoopers <http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/01/21/stinwenws01029.html> 1/21/01 THE police, whose zeal in catching speeding motorists has earned them little popularity, have come up with an arresting new idea. Members of the public are being recruited as informers to mount roadside patrols that clock over-hasty drivers, writes Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas. The new volunteer surveillance corps, kitted out with fluorescent jackets and radar guns, will brandish electronic scoreboards that flash up the motorist's speed. West Yorkshire police say the experiment, based on a Canadian project, is designed to act as a deterrent. However, some motoring groups called the project "absolutely crackers". The scheme is expected to be launched in Shipley, West Yorkshire, within the next few weeks, but may later be adopted across the country. Although the volunteers will have no powers of prosecution, they will occasionally be backed up by police officers. If volunteers spot "blatant" speeding and record the number plate, a warning letter could be sent to the motorist. West Yorkshire Police Federation is less than overjoyed. "They're not trained for this job and could be a danger to themselves and other road users," said a spokesman. "This is policing on the cheap to make up for a shortfall in officers." =================================================================== "WBAI: The Democratic Party's Newest Target" Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 From: Karl Grossman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Lorna Salzman: "WBAI: The Democratic Party's Newest Target" The following is by Lorna Salzman and is about what happened in the mid-1980s to Friends of the Earth, an equivalent in its heyday in the environmental movement to WBAI and KPFA, "Democracy Now," and all of what Pacifica was created to be--bold, grassroots-progressive, a real challenge to the "establishment." Lorna was Mid-Atlantic Representative of Friends of the Earth. She draws this from an article by her published in 1990. She can be reached at <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Karl Grossman ---- WBAI: The Democratic Party's Newest Target by Lorna Salzman The sneak attack against WBAI-FM by its parent Pacifica Foundation did not happen suddenly. The gradual take-over by corporate and Democratic Party infiltrators happened over a period of some years, leading some to wonder just why the radio network staff, volunteers and local advisory boards never noticed what was going on. Perhaps they were so delighted just to get their stuff on the air without censorship that they figured free speech was all they needed. But having said that, I think the latest struggle at WBAI in NYC needs to be seen not in isolation but as part of a nationwide pattern of subversion of progressive and radical voices and tendencies, a pattern that definitely includes the recent backlash by pro-abortion, women's and civil rights groups against the Nader presidential campaign and against the Green Party, which,along with those who sympathized with or gave voice to the anti-Republicrat feelings, will intensify over the next four years. It was quite telling, at yesterday's teach-in by WBAI staff and supporters, to hear that the president of the Pacifica Foundation has retained her Federal government job through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Such stability in the face of purported partisan battles can only mean that "she must be doing something right", at least from her employer's point of view. By inference this means for the rest of us that he must be doing something wrong. My contribution here is a history that presaged the WBAI battle by fifteen years: that of the (likely) Democratic Party/managerial elite/centrist takeover and destruction of Friends of the Earth between 1984 and 1986. The same maneuvers and patterns that characterize the Pacifica battle were eerily present in the FOE battle, in which I played a role: union busting, stifling of dissidents, suppression of information from FOE members, facilitated by the slow but inexorable "election" to the FOE board of directors of individuals with either a personal grudge against FOE founder Dave Brower or sympathetic to the message of the Washington DC managerial elite that only deference to and control by the DC loyalists would rescue the foundering organization. FOE was not foundering in 1984. It had between 25,000 and 30,000 members. But it did have a new president, Rafe Pomerance (DC legislative director), after Brower resigned the presidency in 1980. At that FOE was pretty close to a break-even figure in its budget and at its highest membership level since its founding in 1979. And despite its comparatively small membership, it had the clout, expertise, experience and status equal to any of the other Beltway Biggies with their hundreds of thousands of supporters and multi-million dollar budgets (Greenpeace's budget was in the hundreds of millions of dollars at that time, due to their slave canvassers and top-down authoritarian structure). As soon as Brower resigned the organization's morale, stability, mutual trust and solidity on issues like nuclear power and genetic engineering began quickly to erode. Old friends of Brower were turned against him by people with personal gripes and jealousy, who bought into the argument that FOE needed to grow and curry favor with Congress and that such "improvement" in its status and money situation required a tighter, more centrally controlled organization. Rapidly after Brower left, the compromises on issues began, notably on nuclear power, where FOE - thanks to its energy advisor Amory Lovins and the San Francisco-based IPSEP (International Project for Soft Energy Paths) to promote Lovins' "soft energy path" -had taken the national lead in opposition. While I worked in NYC opposing Mo Udall's nuke giveaway to the nuclear industry on radioactive waste (which earned him a commendation from the Atomic Industrial Forum for resisting the anti-nuke groups), the FOE DC office was selling FOE out to him along with the Sierra Club, Environmental Policy Institute, etc. They didn't like my NY press releases naming the names of the sell-out groups and when I went down for a Nader Critical Mass conference, they pulled me into the inner office and proceeded to berate me for "washing dirty linen in public". A bit later the head of the Sierra Club, to which I belonged, Denny Schaffer, had sent a letter to environmentalists urging support of the then-North Carolina governor against US Senator Jesse Helms. I wrote Schaffer, pointing out that the governor (Jim Hunt) had worked against a black anti-toxic waste dump group in NC by getting the US EPA to waive its (stringent) rules against siting such dumps less than 50 feet above groundwater. The site in Warren County, NC was about half that distance. Shaffer of course notified Rafe Pomerance, my boss, who suspended me for a few months. It turned out that the main reason was that the FOE PAC director, Bob Chlopak (formerly of US PIRG and a Democratic Party secret operative who some may be familiar with) had thrown "FOE" (i.e. Chlopak-FOEPAC) support to Hunt and was embarrassed by my letter. Final straw was when FOEPAC announced its support of Walter Mondale BEFORE the Democratic Primary, claiming support of the staff. A big lie: only Chlopak's pals in DC supported him. The vast majority of the staff favored no endorsement at all until after the primary, and of those the majority opposed Mondale in any case. After Chlopak announced the FOE PAC endorsement of a freshman LI congressman who had no environmental record to speak of, I wrote a letter on my behalf (I was Mid-Atlantic Representative of FOE, having been hired in 1975 by Brower) and that of the NY Branch, for whom I was a volunteer for two years prior to that, and for a year or so after my peremptory firing in 19840. In this letter I said that FOE PAC endorsements should be done only with the involvement and support of the FOE rep and/or branch in the particular district. Rafe Pomerance responded with a telegram: you are terminated due to insubordination. After being fired, I watched the FOE Inquisition continue. They fired Brower (illegally). He was reinstated by the courts. Brower, seeing the staff cuts due to huge budget overruns run up by those who had TAKEN OVER AFTER BROWER LEFT THE PRESIDENCY, asked permission to run his own ad in their monthly paper Not Man Apart to solicit money to restore money to rehire staff. The board said yes. But Brower's ad contained all the information about what the board was doing, which revealed all the lies, corruption, and possibly illegal stuff going on. So the board confiscated all but 300 copies of NMA! So FOE members never found out what was going on. Here is what was going on. I knew it all first hand from other staff people, who sent me lots of stuff in plain brown envelopes (which I still have and which enabled me to write this entire ugly history in Philosophy & Social Action, a journal unfortunately not published in the US). The resemblance to the recent events at WBAI and Pacifica are uncanny. --terminated FOE's anti-nuclear lobbying in DC; --closed the San Francisco office (the seat of Brower's suppport and national headquarters), and moved it to Washington DC, which cost FOE probably about a quarter of a million dollars; --made executive director Karl Wendelowski publisher of Not Man Apart, and enabled him to control all content of NMA; --refused to act on a legally authorized resolution by a minority of Board members to call for a special members' meeting (which if held would be in California, where Brower had most support); --issued a gag order prohibiting directors from using membership lists, to prevent members from finding out Board actions and from requesting a special members' meeting as was their right; --demoted international and wildlife program directors in San Francisco and put them under direct control of the DC office (headed by Geoffrey Webb, Jeff Knight, Rafe Pomeance and Liz Raisbeck. The latter is now a v.p. of National Audubon, who warned the FOE board against listening to my "Left" agenda, and who also decided no anti-nuke lobbyist was needed in DC); --vehemently resisted the unionizing of the SF office, and probably was instrumental in the decision to move the head office to DC; --terminated all Friends of the Earth Foundation (501-(c)3 branch of FOE) grants to FOE, including the chairman's (Brower) fund; --hired a law firm charging hundreds of dollars an hour, at FOE expense, to file baseless slanderous lawsuits against Brower, and refused to set dollar limits to the litigation; --continued to appeal to members for funds for four FOE programs, three of which had already been DISCONTINUED due to staff cuts; --campaigned during the court-ordered mail ballot election for the Board against Brower, and for the anti-Brower board majority and their prospective associates, in VIOLATION of FOE bylaws (I was one of the Brower slate for the board); --refused to send members' ballots by first class mail; many were received late or not at all, disenfranchising nearly 20% of the entire FOE membership; --made vicious ad hominem attacks against Brower at board meetings (Brower had just been operated on for colon cancer); --took foundation grant money, solicited and earmarked for the marine mammals program in SF and spent it on its mid-west office (headed by a board loyalist) and on moving the SF headquarters to DC. The foundation who gave this money sued FOE in 1988 for the money and for damages; the suit was settled out of court with the then-directors, reportedly. --Rafe Pomerance resigned in 1984 and it came out soon after the both Chlopak and Knight left mysteriously, with Chlopak and Knight receiving $30,000 in severance payments - a sum equal to all of FOE's entire cash balance for 1984. Chlopak also received indemnification from FOE against all future lawsuits that might arise as a result of his job with FOE, and the right to censor any and all public statements that FOE might make regarding his FOE tenure. Question: why did Chlopak demand and need this indemnification? This severance was paid by the FEF part of FOE (tax exempt foundation) by the late Alan Gussow, without the knowledge or consent of the FEF board, which later refused to investigate the payments (FOE later decided to do so but the investigation probably never took place). When I wrote a rhetorical letter to the board about possible violation of fiduciary trust, their attorney David Sive called me on the phone with a veiled threat that I might be sued if I persisted. The special mail election was held and Brower's slate lost by 160 votes. Brower resigned in 1986. He died this past November. He had gone on to found the Earth Island Institute, just as he had founded FOE after being ousted from the Sierra Club for his doubts about nuclear power. Who were the people who turned against Brower and destroyed FOE? Good liberals all, excepting Bob Chlopak, who I am convinced was sent by the Democratic Party to FOE to undercut its uncompromising environmental policies, on nuclear power as well as everything else. Here are some of them: Wes Jackson, director of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas Paul Berks, a clergyman who participated in non-violent sit-ins against the Rocky Flats Arsenal in Colorado; Mark Terry, noted environmental and energy educator; Anne Ehrlich, scientists and activist like her husband Paul' Ann Roosevelt, wife of James Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat then active in Massachusetts politics; Alan Gussow (deceased), well known painter; David Sive, leading environmental attorney, author of environmental statutes and policies, former partner in Neuberger and Sive, at one time a pro-environment firm; Edwin Matthew Jr., attorney at Coudert Brothers, large pro-corporate law firm and long time friend of Brower; Rafe Pomerance, from the wealthy prominent Wertheim family that included nature writer Ann Simon, and Barbara and Jessica Tuchman. Rafe's mother Jo was a dedicated peace activist. The subversion of progressives continues, on other fronts. L.S. Lorna Salzman 718-522-0253; 631-653-3387 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved" (Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species). "Evolutionary history should provide the primary basis for assessing biological integrity" (Paul Angermeier & James Karr, BioScience, vol. 44 #10, Nov. 1994) (re Economics): "There aren't many other specialties that are more abstract and out of touch with the reality of Nature.." (Gus Steeves). =================================================================== Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future http://www.prwatch.org/books/experts.html#description "If you want to know how the world wags, and who's wagging it, here's your answer. Read, get mad, roll up your sleeves, and fight back. Rampton and Stauber have issued a wake-up call we can't ignore."--Bill Moyers ---- We count on the experts. We count on them to tell us who to vote for, what to eat, how to raise our children. We watch them on TV, listen to them on the radio, read their opinions in magazine and newspaper articles and letters to the editor. We trust them to tell us what to think, because there's too much information out there and not enough hours in a day to sort it all out. We should stop trusting them right this second. In their new book, Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber offer a chilling expose on the manufacturing of "independent experts." Public relations firms and corporations have seized upon a slick new way of getting you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral "third party," like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you believe what they have to say--preferably in an "objective" format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their "opinions." For example: You think that nonprofit organizations just give away their stamps of approval on products? Bristol-Myers Squibb paid $600,000 to the American Heart Association for the right to display AHA's name and logo in ads for its cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol. Smith Kline Beecham paid the American Cancer Society $1 million for the right to use its logo in ads for Beecham's Nicoderm CQ and Nicorette anti-smoking ads. You think that you're witnessing a spontaneous public debate over a national issue? When the Justice Department began antitrust investigations of the Microsoft Corporation in 1998, Microsoft's public relations firm countered with a plan to plant pro-Microsoft articles, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces all across the nation, crafted by professional media handlers but meant to be perceived as off-the-cuff, heart-felt testimonials by "people out there." You think that a study out of a prestigious university is completely unbiased? In 1997, Georgetown University's Credit Research Center issued a study which concluded that many debtors are using bankruptcy as an excuse to wriggle out of their obligations to creditors. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen cited the study in a Washington Times column and advocated for changes in federal law to make it harder for consumers to file for bankruptcy relief. What Bentsen failed to mention was that the Credit Research Center is funded in its entirety by credit card companies, banks, retailers, and others in the credit industry; that the study itself was produced with a $100,000 grant from Visa USA and MasterCard International Inc.; and that Bentsen himself had been hired to work as a credit-industry lobbyist. You think that all grassroots organizations are truly grassroots? In 1993, a group called Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP) appeared, calling itself "the largest women's environmental group in Australia, with thousands of supporters across the country." Their cause: A campaign against plastic milk bottles. It turned out that the group's spokesperson, Alana Maloney, was in truth a woman named Janet Rundle, the business partner of a man who did P.R. for the Association of Liquidpaperboard Carton Manufacturers-the makers of paper milk cartons. You think that if a scientist says so, it must be true? In the early 1990s, tobacco companies secretly paid thirteen scientists a total of $156,000 to write a few letters to influential medical journals. One biostatistician received $10,000 for writing a single, eight-paragraph letter that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A cancer researcher received $20,137 for writing four letters and an opinion piece to the Lancet, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and the Wall Street Journal. Nice work if you can get it, especially since the scientists didn't even have to write the letters themselves. Two tobacco-industry law firms were available to do the actual drafting and editing. Rampton and Stauber reveal many more such examples of "perception management"--all of them orchestrated to make us buy or believe whatever the "independent expert" is pushing. They also explore the underlying assumptions about human psychology--e.g., "the public must be manipulated for its own good"--that make this kind of subliminal hard-sell possible. Destined to be hated by P.R. firms and corporations everywhere, Trust Us, We're Experts is an eye-opening account of how these entities reshape our reality, manufacture our consent, get us to part with our money, even change our lives. A whole new spin on spin, it will forever alter the way we look at news, information, and the people who serve it up to us. WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING "Stauber and Rampton have once again exposed the ugly underbelly of corporate America's psychological war on our citizens. Trust Us, We're Experts shows how giant corporations employ sophisticated psychiatric techniques, unscrupulous public figures, junk science, tainted studies and clever PR mercenaries in a relentless effort to market products that routinely kill, maim, deform and poison consumers and our environment."--Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Water Keeper Alliance "If you want to know how the world wags, and who's wagging it, here's your answer. Read, get mad, roll up your sleeves, and fight back. Rampton and Stauber have issued a wake-up call we can't ignore."--Bill Moyers "Trust Us, We're Experts is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism and a powerful vaccine against the stupifying effects of the corporate PR machine. Spread it around!"--Barbara Ehrenreich "If you've ever wanted to see a TV spin doctor hog-tied and dragged through the streets, Rampton and Stauber do the next best thing. This book is modern muckraking of the best variety, skewering hype and showing us how to separate real experts from snake oil salesmen and hired corporate know-it-alls."--Jim Hightower "Finally, a long-overdue expose of the shenanigans and subterfuge that lie behind the making of experts in America. Stauber and Rampton take us behind the scenes, inside corporate boardrooms, where marketing chiefs literally manufacture their own 'independent experts' to defend their products and practices. This groundbreaking book gives us a first look into the seamy side of corporate public relations, where academic experts of every stripe and kind are bought in various ways. An eye-opener."--Jeremy Rifkin "Unlike many exposes, the book is a page-turner. Once you start, you will want to read it all. While your heart may sink, your passions will be aroused. It is like a sudden awareness that sweeps illusions away. This is not a casual jeremiad, but a careful, patiently researched deconstruction of corporate behavior and their so-called ethics."--Paul Hawken, author of Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism "Rampton and Stauber's book explodes the cult of expertise and shows how easily the media and their readers can be misled by public relations claims masquerading as science. This book makes the best case I know for complete disclosure of the financial conflicts of interest of scientists and the corporate influence on university research."--Sheldon Krimsky, Professor at Tufts University, author of: Hormonal Chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis "Trust Us brilliantly exposes the dirtiest public relations campaigns in America for what they are--cynical attempts to undermine our democracy so some creep can sell your kid more cigarrettes, push more Microsoft software on you or melt down the North Pole with global warming pollution."--John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace US "This book is a must for everyone attempting to sift through the vast amount of information available in the media and on the net. It reveals how high-priced, international public relations corporations are hired to redefine facts, create confusion, and destroy reputations of accomplished scientists to protect their bottom line. The good news comes at the end of the book when the authors tell how to filter the news to remove the 'bottom-line bias' so exquisitely woven into advertisements and news items by special interests."--Theo Colborn, Senior Program Scientist, World Wildlife Fund, co-author of Our Stolen Future "The United States today is in the midst of the Golden Age of Propaganda. Well-heeled private interests have learned how to manipulate journalism and public discourse on fundamental public health, environmental and political issues through the sophisticated use of public relations, bogus experts and junk science. In Trust Us, We're Experts Rampton and Stauber do the extraordinary and groundbreaking job of exposing these sleazy practices and rigorously holding them up to the light of day. Well organized and wonderfully written, Trust Us, We're Experts is a real page turner. It is a true masterpiece."--Robert W. McChesney author, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times "After reading this book I couldn't possibly listen to an expert witness again, even one under oath, without a lot of healthy skepticism; and if given the opportunity, without asking: 'Who's paying you to say this?' "--Mark Dowie "This is a great book, and I think you should buy it. But since the point of the book is to think for yourself and not trust experts, perhaps you should thumb through it yourself for a little while. I think of it as a field guide to the kinds of lies you can expect from the information age."--Bill McKibben "Amusing . . . meticulously researched . . . Rampton and Stauber's documentation of PR campaigns proves that they are the real 'experts.' "-- Kaja Perina, Brill's Content TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Preface: The Smell Test SECTION ONE: The Age of Spin The Third Man The Birth of Spin Deciding What You'll Swallow SECTION TWO: Risky Business Dying for a Living Packaging the Beast Preventing Precaution Attack of the Killer Potatoes SECTION THREE: The Expertise Industry The Best Science Money Can Buy The Junkyard Dogs Global Warming Is Good For You EPILOGUE: Questioning Authority APPENDIX: Suggested Resources INDEX =================================================================== January 29, 2001 The left is right? <http://www.liberzine.com/michaelmallinger/010129activists.htm> by Michael Mallinger Left wing activists have always been a mystery to me. Despite the intellectual advancements made by Downsian political scholars and Dick Morris' efforts to enable former President Clinton to "triangulate" toward the Center, left wing activists insist on monopolizing the media's attention and keeping their extremism in the public eye. In light of the events that took place in Berlin in 1991, I've often wondered why they continue to shoot their centrist allies in the feet. When the coordinators of Counterprotest.net, the libertarian activist group, asked me to help observe one of the left-wing coalition's organizational meetings at George Washington University last Thursday night, I was eager to oblige. Ever since their WTO protest in Seattle, the leaders of the radical left have called their movement a spontaneous order, a collection of autonomous individuals whose uncoordinated actions disrupt the efforts of politicians and negotiators to impose their undemocratic will on people. In a way, they assert that by stealing the principles of Nobel Prize winning economist F.A. Hayek, they can defeat proponents of free market policies at their own game. Although these bold claims are rather esoteric, the radical left operates like any other political coalition. The meeting of the G.W. Direct Action Committee was like any other successful organizational meeting: it was well-attended by students and utilized speakers and discussion panels to provide them with information on how to get involved in groups working on issues such as globalization, civil rights, the war on drugs, the death penalty, and many others. Although each of the speakers took time to bash President George W. Bush and to encourage students to participate in the various inaugural protests here in Washington to revive the "Fighting Left," three of them said things that influenced my understanding of how their movement operates and keeps its members motivated. The first speaker who stuck out in my mind was from the International Socialist Organization. Although his discussion focused on what he believes to be the institutionally racist nature of the United States Constitution, he made many references to how poorly organized he perceives the left-wing coalition to be. Specifically, he demanded that it do a better job in the future to counteract the influence of free market groups on the new administration in the White House. In reality, anyone who watches the news understands that this coalition functions with remarkable efficiency. It is the protests, not the meetings of the WTO, World Bank, and IMF, that people will remember about the international negotiations that took place at the turn of the century. In criticizing his fellow leaders for their "paltry" organizational efforts, he was able to able to put additional pressure on the students to get involved. The second speaker who managed to connect with the crowd was an anarchist who works with a number of local organizations including "Food, Not Bombs," and many others. He spoke about his personal experience getting arrested by federal officers while traveling to North Carolina to help set up another group. He pointed out that, if individual members of the left want to have a serious impact on how political decisions are made, they must be willing to make personal sacrifices to aid their cause. He explained that people who are serious about being an agent of change don't just contribute to their movement in their spare time they sacrifice high-paying jobs to work directly for groups that influence legislators and public opinion. Most importantly, he emphasized that the state's efforts to persecute them should serve as a reminder of how important their ideals really are. The final speaker of the night was from a group called the World Bank Bonds Boycott. Unlike members of other IMF/World Bank protest groups, he demonstrated an acute understanding of how the World Bank's projects harm poor people. Surprisingly, although he blamed corporations and the institutions of global capitalism for part of the problem, he spent a great deal of time talking about how public universities take advantage of their tax-exempt status to load their endowment funds with bonds that finance World Bank projects. He encouraged students to follow the example set by the anti-sweatshop labor movement and demand that their schools refuse to purchase these bonds. This led to the most interesting exchange of the evening. One student questioned whether or not students could actually do anything, short of transferring, to punish university officials for their bad behavior. Most of the students seemed to understand that public universities face very strong incentives to address the concerns of their state boards of regents who administer their funding, but have little reason to address the concerns of students regarding financial matters. At this point, the anarchist who had spoken earlier chimed in and pointed out that many university officials are frequently forced to put themselves in "vulnerable" situations. He offered an account of how he and his friends threatened to publicize a series of events that took place at American University in exchange for the administration's cooperation on certain issues. He characterized this tactic as "finding where the soft spots are." Although it has been fifty-seven years since Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, his claims that only the most ruthless leaders rise to the top of unrestrained governments still ring true. Even student activists who support democracy and transparency in decision-making do not hesitate to threaten to destroy people's careers behind closed doors if doing so will serve their ends. It seems that, the more things change regarding how the radical left delivers its message to the media and the public, the more they stay the same. The left wing protesting coalition is not a trendy college fad that will fade away once the World Bank and WTO cease making headlines. It has expanded and evolved to occupy a permanent position in the struggle for power on the progressive side of the political spectrum. While it may promote extremist ranting that harms the progressive cause, its ruthless efficiency represents a serious threat to economic freedom and liberty everywhere. Its leaders are extremely knowledgeable individuals who understand how to handicap their opponents and keep their members motivated in the face of widespread success. Proponents of free market policies should take note of that success and harness the awesome power that coalitions working on groups of issues can wield. Although not every progressive activist supports the protection of civil liberties, many of them do feel strongly that the Bill of Rights (minus the Second Amendment) must be protected. Most of them understand that the crony capitalism and corporate welfare peddled by organizations like the World Bank will not help poor people. Many of them are serious about fighting the war on drugs. Although their immoral tactics should not be tolerated, well-organized progressive organizations could prove to be valuable allies in the fight against militantly imperialistic foreign policies, xenophobic immigration laws, and other injustices that harm poor people the most. Free market activists should look upon the activities of their progressive brethren not as a sign that what little moral fabric that permeates western culture is now unraveling, but as an opportunity to make advancements on issues that both groups feel strongly about. We have everything to gain from working with those who understand our arguments and want to help make any part of our vision a reality. ---- Michael Mallinger is a libertarian activist and a research associate at a think tank in Washington, D.C. =================================================================== http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg16949.html January 3, 2001 Traffik/Traffic By Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> After Stephen Soderbergh transformed "A Civil Action" -- an environmentalist study of a small town fighting industrial polluters in court -- into a sexploitative star vehicle for Julia Roberts, it should not surprise us that he would Hollywood-ize the hard-hitting television miniseries "Traffik". Made for Channel 4 in Great Britain in 1989, "Traffik" also appeared on public television in the United States one year later. In "Traffic" Soderbergh has appropriated (or misappropriated) some core elements of the original, while leaving out others that would get in the way of his commercial goals. The resultant mess helps us understand how liberal taste-makers frame the "war on drugs" in the face of an impending war in Colombia. Considering that Soderbergh's first film was titled "Sex, Lies and Videotape", an appropriate subtitle for "Traffic" might be "Drugs, Lies and Hollywood". In "Traffik", we are afforded a multi-tiered view of Great Britain's war on the heroin trade. The central figure is a British Home Office minister named Jack Lithgow (Bill Paterson) who has been assigned to oversee that war. The irony, and one of the key dramatic elements of the tale, is that his daughter is a drug addict. While relentlessly pursuing the source of the "traffik" in Pakistan, he is constantly being pulled into his daughter's own maelstrom. "Traffik" derives its German title from the fact that one of the politician's main antagonists is a German who uses a construction business as a front for a much more lucrative heroin import business. After he is arrested in the course of a major drug interdiction effort, his wife takes over -- even though she has been innocent of his activities up to that point. Her easy slide into criminality serves to illustrate the point that nobody is immune from the enormous temptations of a quick profit. Not only does she assume control without missing a beat, she seems even more savvy than her jailed husband. She announces, "I'm going to be strong about this. I'm not going to let go of everything we fought for", as if the family business was commercial real estate. In Soderbergh's film the terrain and the commodity have shifted. We are now dealing with the cocaine trade and its source is Mexico. The main character is an American drug czar Robert Wakefield, played by the ubiquitous Michael Douglas. His daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen) is a cocaine free-baser who turns to prostitution to pay for her habit. In a search for his daughter, which has all the hyped-up intensity of a Charles Bronson revenge melodrama, Wakefield descends into the Black community, which takes on the character of the Casbah. Blacks on the street appear menacing to Wakefield (and the largely white audience I saw the film with), as if each had a knife in one pocket and a drug stash in the other. Another significant difference between the two films is how each drug czar relates to the rogue third world country where the drugs originate. In "Traffik", Lithgow is directing a campaign to wean Pakistani farmers away from growing opium toward legal cash crops. His idealistic hopes are eventually crushed when he realizes that there is no incentive for peasants to stop growing opium. Unfortunately nothing grows in the arid Pakistani soil as well as the poppy. "It doesn't need much water," Lithgow is told. "It doesn't need much in the way of nutrients. They are just weeds -- the richest weeds in the world." He learns that farmers must grow and harvest 10 acres of sugar cane to reap the profit from just three acres of poppies. Perhaps the heroin and cocaine trade is driven by the same brute economic facts that drive the tobacco industry, a legal but much more toxic industry. According to the book "Barbarians at the Gate," investor Warren Buffett told Salomon Chairman John Gutfreund in 1987: "I'll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It's addictive. And there's fantastic brand loyalty." While "Traffik" is mostly about character development -- particularly Lithgow's disillusionment -- "Traffic" is mostly a lurid 'policier', a sort of big budget version of the old TV show "Miami Vice", in which law enforcement becomes paramount, despite the film's lip-service to the obvious truth that the war on drugs is unwinnable. In Soderbergh's film, the major point of view in Mexico belongs to Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro), an honest cop out to bust the corrupt Army general and the drug lords he protects. This Mexico is even more wicked than the Black community, at least in cinematographic terms. Soderbergh, who handled the camera itself for the Mexico location, uses a sulfur-yellow filter to make sure that the audience understands that this is a hellish place. While "Traffik" takes place largely in Pakistan, where the opium is grown, there is no interest in finding out what conditions spawn the growth of coca. For that to take place, the film would have to include Colombia as a venue. If you restrict your terrain to Mexico, you are dealing solely with the finished product. And who else handles the finished product but case-hardened businessmen rather than people at the bottom, who rely on the soil to make a living. This is where "Traffik" excels. The film begins with Fazal (Jamal Shah), an impoverished Pakistani farmer who grows opium poppies on his farm and ekes out barely enough money to support his wife and two children. Lithgow eventually meets Fazal and asks, "Do you know that people in the West are dying from the heroin you make?" "Sir, I grow opium, not heroin," Fazal replies. "You deal with the heroin problem." Soderbergh is quite open about his desire to flatter law enforcement agencies in the USA, while simultaneously maintaining a hip "war on drugs can not succeed" 'tude. In a profile that appears in the Jan. 3-9 Village Voice, Soderbergh states: "I didn't want to come off like we had answers. The idea that some silly filmmaker after two years could sort it out would be outrageous. But there seems to be a huge vacuum in the public debate and I guess this is one of the few times I felt a movie could actually help. The funny thing is, everybody who sees it thinks it puts their point of view across, and I was expecting exactly the opposite. We had a screening in Washington for Customs, DEA, and the Department of Justice and they all came out saying they really liked it. The following night, there was some hardcore leftie NPR/PBS [!!!!] screening in L.A. and some guy stands up and goes, 'Thank you for making the first pro-legalization movie.' Then the other night, Commissioner Safir came to a screening and said he thought it was the most accurate representation of law enforcement he'd seen in a long time. And I have, you know, stoner friends who are going, like, 'Dude, yeah, great . . . '" Nobody could possibly accuse Soderbergh of coming off like he had answers. But one might have hoped that he would have had a more open-eyed view of the cops in the United States, who appear in the film to be the Mexican police's only reliable ally. Since Soderbergh is based in Los Angeles, one can only conclude that he has not been reading a newspaper for the past few years. Otherwise, he would have felt the need to introduce a little bit of reality into his script, based on the gargantuan Ramparts Division scandal. It turns out that over the past decade or so, the LAPD anti-drug division has been deeply involved in the cocaine trade itself. Ex-cop, now serving a long prison sentence, Rafael Perez was accused of murdering dealers during a botched drug deal in the mid-1990s. His ex-girl friend claims that the bodies of those victims and that of another woman allegedly killed by Perez's partner David Mack were buried in Mexico in hopes that, if they were discovered, they would be presumed to be victims of the region's drug wars. While some investigators claim that this accusation was false, there is no doubt that Perez and other officers have been found guilty of stealing drugs from the evidence room of their department and re-selling them on the street. In 1999 Perez pleaded guilty to stealing eight pounds of cocaine in exchange for a lighter prison sentence. He also agreed to identify other allegedly corrupt officers. Now this would have made for a more interesting film, since it is a far more accurate representation of how urban police departments behave -- or misbehave. Furthermore, if Soderbergh had been more informed about the relationship between the USA and Mexico, he would have not been so eager to put white hats on all the American officials, especially in light of the revelations made by Thomas A. Constantine, the top drug-enforcement official who resigned last year. In an interview with the NY Times on November 26, 1999, Constantine states regarding the Mexican drug trade: "I watched that situation for five and a half years, and every year it became worse. We were not adequately protecting the citizens of the United States from these organized-crime figures." Why not? "Every time we had a major case involving a criminal organization from Mexico operating in the United States, there was a significant allegation of corruption involving the Mexican Attorney General's office, a Mexican state police force, the highway police," he said. However, the Clinton administration chose not to confront the Mexican government, since American concerns about Mexico's corruption and drug-trafficking problems were secondary to trade and other economic interests. "The idea was, if you said those things publicly, if you release documents, you will just aggravate the situation," he said. "My concern was that we had kids in this country dropping like flies. Maybe that was parochial, but I felt like I was the only person there who felt like that." Even after Constantine's counterpart in Mexico was found in 1997 to have been colluding with the country's biggest cocaine trafficker, serious discussion of the issue within the Clinton administration was minimal, even negligible, he said. The exception was the annual debate over whether to certify the anti-drug efforts of Mexico and other nations that produce or ship illegal drugs. Constantine told the NY Times, "Everyone would say, 'Your facts are correct, but there are bigger policy issues involved.'" =================================================================== December 13, 2000 Supreme Ironies: No Closure, No Peace <http://www.counterpunch.org/nofinality.html> On the one hand the calls for "closure", "finality" and national unity. On the other, Justice John Paul Stevens's bitter summation: "in the interests of finality however the majority [of the US Supreme Court] effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent, and are therefore legal votes under [Florida] state law, but were for some reason rejected by the ballot-counting machines Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's presidential election the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the law." Back in the 1980s radicals used to write about "demonstration elections", conducted in Central American countries such as El Salvador at the instigation of the US government and micromanaged by the CIA. After the money was appropriately spread around, the opposition's more tenacious and principled leaders either butchered by death squads or driven underground, and the unruly poor thoroughly intimidated, the election ritual would take place amid complacent orations about the democratic way from North American commentators. We've just had a peaceful and non-lethal version of these "demonstration elections" in the state of Florida and no calls for closure will erase that national disgrace, least of all in the minds of those who were denied their democratic rights. Don't forget, beyond those who made it to the polls in Florida, there were those denied even the dubious benefits of that access. Beyond the obsession about defiant punch card machines, obstacle course ballots, and pregnant or hanging chads, there are more serious issues that, in the miles of print written about the election in Florida, have received barely a mention: the systematic intimidation of poor people, blacks, hispanics, immigrants and the disabled. Try this story from Ron Davis of Miami-Dade County. "Our family always votes together. This year it was my turn to drive. After work, my wife Lisa and I borrowed a van from a friend and picked up my brother, my parents and my uncle and aunt. About a block away from the polling place, we were pulled over by a county sheriff. He looked in the van and asked me if I had a chauffeur's license. I said, this is my family and we're going to vote. He said, 'You can't take all those people to the polling place without a license. Go home and I won't write you a ticket.' I was tired of arguing. We went home and all tried to vote later. But it was too late." Or how about this account told to us by Dave Crawford of Broward County: "I showed up at the polling place with my five-year old daughter. I was stopped at the door by an election official. He asked me my name. I told him. He said, 'Son, we've got a problem. You're not allowed to vote.' I asked him what the hell he was talking about. He said, 'Son, says here you're a convict. Convicts can't vote.' He had this list in his hand. And I told him that I'd never even been arrested in my life. I handed him my voter ID card. He just shook his head, smiled and pointed at a list. He never showed me my name. My daughter began to cry and I left in disgust." On November 7, blacks and hispanics turned out to vote in record numbers. But tens of thousands were shunted away before they reached the polling booth. The scenes, many of them narrated during an extraordinary 5-hour hearing sponsored by the NAACP and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, harked back to the pre-voting rights act South, when black voters were denied the franchise through a variety of schemes, from the poll tax and character vouchers to loyalty oaths and literacy tests. Across Florida, black voters were turned away from the polls by hostile election workers who demanded voter ID cards, even though those weren't required from white voters. Police set up roadblocks in black precincts around Tallahassee. Other police intimidated voters by asking if they were felons. Polls in black precincts closed early, often with dozens of voters waiting in line. Other polls were moved from their original locations without notice. Dozen of black college students who had registered this summer weren't permitted to vote. Other voters were told that their names weren't on the voter rolls only to find out later that they were. Haitian voters were often asked for two forms of identification. Stacey Powers, a former cop who is now a news director at a Tampa radio station, spent the day visiting different polling places in Tampa's black neighborhoods. She said dozens of black voters were turned away after being told that their names didn't appear on the voting registers. Powers said that when she reminded some voters that they could sign an affidavit and then vote, she was booted out of the polling place. "There were illegal poll watchers, threatening people, telling them: 'I know where you work. You're going to get fired'" reported Charles Weaver, publisher of the Fort Myers-based Community Voice. A catalogue of these accounts was assembled and shipped off to Janet Reno, who, as attorney general, is charged with enforcing the Voting Rights Act. So far, the Clinton Justice Department hasn't taken one step to investigate the charges. "This is a strange stance from the Justice Department", said Kwesi Mfumi, head of the NAACP. "They just seem to get colder to civil rights as the administration draws to a close." Then there were the more than 12,000 largely black voters who were evicted from the Florida voter rolls in May, supposedly because they were ex-felons. In the sunshine state the system functioned in a particularly devious way. Nearly all of those booted off the rolls turned out not to have had criminal records. But nearly all of them were black. Some 8,000 went through the legal red tape to assert their voting rights. The remaining 4,000 didn't bother. Nearly all of those votes would have gone to Gore. The list was prepared by a company known as Database Technologies, a firm picked by Secretary of State Katherine Harris. As the London Guardian reported, Database Techologies is a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, which is has been under investigation for misusing personal information gathered state computers. ChoicePoint's beleagured CEO, Rick Bozar, made a timely $100,000 contribution to the Republican National Committee early this year. Even those who made it inside the polling booth found out later that their votes didn't tally. While the press and the Gore pr machine raged about the injustices done to Jewish voters by the infamous Butterfly ballot, the real story, even in Palm Beach County, was the effort to suppress the black vote. Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell, who speaks venomously of the Gore machine, was one of the first to point this out. "I looked at those precincts," said Caddell. "And it struck me that most of them were in predominately black areas. Of course, they would be just as unlikely to vote for Buchanan as the Jewish retirees. But the Gore people made a deliberately effort to spin it as a case of 4,000 elderly Jewish Democrats being duped into voting for a Nazi." A similar point was made by Adora Ori, the president of the NAACP's Florida chapter. "A closer examination has to be made. The precincts that have the most irregularities at this point seem to be black and minority." The Democratic Party has displayed a marked disinclination to make any political capital out of the denial of black and haitian voting rights in Florida. After a couple of days hammering the issue Jesse Jackson was evidently told to cool it. In Duval County, a Republican stronghold, about 25,000 votes were tossed out by the canvassing board. More than 17,000 of those came from black precincts. "That so-called voter error rate raises real questions about what was going on up there," says Kendrick Meek, a Florida state senator from Miami. Duval County has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the United States. More than 47 percent of the voting age population is considered functionally illiterate, making it nearly impossible for them to comprehend Florida's obscure ballot. Top to it off, according to numerous accounts, election workers regularly demeaned as being "dumb and retarded" those voters who asked for help. Throughout Florida, more than 187,000 votes were dismissed, more than half of them from black precincts. Nationally more than 2.8 million ballot were eliminated, often because of some trifling error by the voter. A disproportionate percentage of these discarded votes originated in black and hispanic precincts. Although more than 95 percent of blacks supported Gore, election offices controlled by Democrats seemed just as determined to suppress the black vote as Republicans. Listen to this account from Palm Beach County resident Mary Didier. "My husband and I moved to Palm Beach from New York City eight months ago. We had just retired as public school teachers. We registered to vote at the motor vehicle department when I got my license. Months went by and we never received our voter cards. About six weeks before the election I began to get nervous and called the DMV. They said it wasn't their problem and that I should contact the election office. I drove down there. They had no record of us. I said, 'I want to re-register now.' The woman told me to wait a few weeks and see if the card came. We waited. It never came. The week before the election, I went in again. They said, 'Do you have any proof of how long you've lived in Florida.' I gave showed them my driver's license. They said that wasn't good enough. I got mad and left. Then I called the state election's office. They said they didn't have time to deal with a minor issue like this. It was the first time I haven't voted in 30 years." Didier was not alone. In West Palm Beach the votes of more than 2,000 recent Haitian immigrants were rejected because of the maze-like ballot and the lack of Creole interpreters. "There were lots of Spanish translators to make sure all of the Cubans voted, but none who spoke Creole", Ken Murtaugh, a poll watcher in West Palm Beach, told CounterPunch. "Most of them were utterly confused. Others just walked away. It was pathetic. They were treated as being subhuman." In other counties, Haitians were harassed for their voter identification cards or told that their names couldn't be found on the voter rolls. Others were threatened with deportation. In one precinct with Creole translators, election officials ordered the interpreters not to speak to Haitian voters or risk being tossed from the polling place. There should be no closure on these outrages, even though it is hard to imagine George W. Bush's Justice Department exerting itself in this regard. Nor should there be closure on what Justice Stevens stigmatized as the refusal, endorsed by the 5-4 US Supreme Court majority, to recognize the clear voting intentions of those who did managed to gain access to Florida's dubious voting machines. The saga of shenanigans in Florida has been a bracing civic education, not least because we have learned to appreciate yet again that judges' politics weigh far more strongly upon their opinion-forming faculties than a thousand precedents in American constitutional law. A strict constructionist on states' rights like Justice Scalia can become a federalist overnight, when the chips are down. This has been a year when some members of the US Supreme Court have discredited themselves thoroughly. Justices Rehnquist, Kennedy and Scalia all have sons who were involved in the Microsoft case, from which the Justices nonetheless declined to recuse themselves. So far as the Florida decisions are concerned Scalia should certainly have recused himself since he had more than one conflict of interest. For example: on November 7 his son John joined the Miami law firm Greenberg, Traurig. The following day Barry Richard, a partner in that firm, said he was called to represent Bush in Florida. Clarence Thomas's wife has been working for the Heritage Foundation which is putting forward resumes for appointments in the Bush administration. Section 455 of Title 28 of the United States' code requires recusal if a spouse has "an interest that could substantially be affected by the outcome of the proceedings." Other family relations, such as Scalia's, can cause for recusal. Scalia has leaked stories to the effect that if Gore were to be elected he would leave the Court. Here's a pewter lining for Al Gore. Paradoxically, the US Supreme Court may have helped his political career. Suppose the Court had found in Gore's favor and permitted the recount to continue. It's quite possible he would have lost the recount and had no future at all, by dint of having dragged out the election and ending up as the ultimate sore loser. Or suppose Gore won the Florida count by a few votes and bulldozed his way into the White House. He'd have been a one-termer for sure, amid recession and the incandescent hatred of the Republicans for an illegitimate occupant of the Oval office. Now, despite a dismal campaign, he emerges as a man who can claim with some merit that he was the popular choice, winning nationally by nearly 300,000 votes; that he probably won the state of Florida, given the more than 30,000 votes in Duval and Palm Beach counties cast for him but disallowed because of double punching; that he may have well won the legal vote had it not been for the Republican strict obstructionists. Thus Gore may have already fended off challenges as the comeback Democratic candidate of 2004. It is true that little in the way of substantive issues separated Bush from Gore. That is surely why the Florida imbroglio has been so mostly untroubling . Never has there been greater fuss over smaller stakes until we come to Justice Stevens's bottom line.If this has been a constitutional crisis, the fates gave us the right time to have one. Al Gore made his call for unity last Tuesday night, for the "coming together" demanded on a nightly basis by Larry King and the others. It proves Ralph Nader's point and once again vindicates his candidacy, one that in Florida and New Hampshire denied Al Gore conclusive victory on November 7. The weeks since November 7 have entirely vindicated the accuracy of Nader's assault on the corruption of the two party system. We've seen Republicans toss aside their supposed dedication to states' rights, same as did Scalia as he bent his supposed principles to elect a President he hopes will make him Chief Justice. We've seen Democrats equally eager to assert states' rights, while exhibiting absolutely no disquiet about the actual application of states' rights in Florida, meaning the racist efforts described above to stop blacks and other minorities from voting at all. Not a word from Gore on this. Honesty is divisive. It was a "demonstration election" in every sense of the word. It demonstrated how rotten the whole system is. =================================================================== Great countercoup strategies & Anti-bush Links Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Great countercoup strategies & Anti-bush Links Hi, Friends, Here are some of the strategies suggested by people for dealing with the election theft/coup d'etat. These were posted in some e- groups that I read a lot. 1. Write messages on the back of all paper money. (Like 'Gore Won', 'Bush is a Fraud', 'Jail to the Thief') 2. Write messages on the "drop-out cards" in magazines. Replace them, or mail them in. 3. Put messages on paper or cardboard bookmarks, put them in books at bookstores, libraries, etc. 4. Get label stickers (Avery, 30 to a sheet, etc.) then print or write messages on them. Stick them everywhere, grocery stores, Doctor's office, etc. 5. Download graphics to print on label stickers, or bumper sticker size labels. Put these "Impeach Bush", etc. labels on phone poles, walls, etc. Click on the URL below to find these graphics. Some suggestions were : Gore got more votes, Illegitimate Presidency, Hail to the Thief, Commander-in-Thief, His Fraudulency - The Nitwit, Bush Cheated, Impeach Bush, etc. Keep getting the message out that we know what happened and we will not forget! In 2002 and 2004 we must vote out ALL the dirty Republicans, at the national, state, and local levels! Bill C. This HUGE List of Links was updated January 23, 2001. Bill's BEST Links to Progressive & Anti-Bush News, T-shirts, Bumper Stickers, Forums, and more. On the Web at http://www.iuptown.com/WatchDubya/BillsBestLinks.htm =================================================================== U.S. approves high-resolution spying by commercial satellites <http://www.worldtribune.com/Archive-2001/ss-tech-01-24.html> WORLD TRIBUNE.COM Wednesday, January 24, 2000 WASHINGTON The United States has awarded a license to produce the first commercial images with a resolution of a half-meter. The license was granted as part of a contract awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to operate a commercial remote sensing spacecraft capable of providing half-meter resolution imagery of the Earth. The license was granted to Space Imaging in what sets a precedent in the U.S. satellite industry. The license is the result of a successful lobbying effort by the space industry, which overcame administration objections to providing such high-resolution reconnaissance images. Israel had urged that U.S. companies be banned from distributing images of the Jewish state out of concern that they would end up in the hands of its enemies, Middle East Newsline reported. "We are pleased with the outcome of the license process," John Copple, chief executive officer of Space Imaging. "There are many people who have contributed to advancing this remote sensing policy. Now we will be able to keep pace with the rapid changes in technology for our next generation systems." The company plans to launch its new satellite in 2004. Space Imaging's satellite imaging system will provide half-meter resolution black-and-white and two-meter resolution color imagery. This will include images of such objects as trees and farm animals. Executives said the resolution is not accurate enough to identify people. In 1992 the Congress passed a bill that enables U.S. companies to build and launch commercial imaging satellites to compete with similar foreign ventures. In 1994 the president signed a directive that further defined the government's remote sensing policies and approved one-meter resolution satellite imagery. In 1999, Lockheed Martin launched the Ikonos satellite, which produces images of one-meter resolution. ====================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. 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