nettime Justice Department attempting to remove public documents from libraries
http://scoop.agonist.org/story/2004/8/3/84635/46365 Fortunately this order has been apparently rescinded. See http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=Newstemplate=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfmContentID=72299 -- snip! -- Last week, the American Library Association learned that the Department of Justice asked the Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents to instruct depository libraries to destroy five publications the Department has deemed not appropriate for external use. The Department of Justice has called for these five public documents, two of which are texts of federal statutes, to be removed from depository libraries and destroyed, making their content available only to those with access to a law office or law library. The topics addressed in the named documents include information on how citizens can retrieve items that may have been confiscated by the government during an investigation. The documents to be removed and destroyed include: Civil and Criminal Forfeiture Procedure; Select Criminal Forfeiture Forms; Select Federal Asset Forfeiture Statutes; Asset forfeiture and money laundering resource directory; and Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 (CAFRA). ALA has submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the withdrawn materials in order to obtain an official response from the Department of Justice regarding this unusual action, and why the Department has requested that documents that have been available to the public for as long as four years be removed from depository library collections. ALA is committed to ensuring that public documents remain available to the public and will do its best to bring about a satisfactory resolution of this matter. Librarians should note that, according to policy 72, written authorization from the Superintendent of Documents is required to remove any documents. To this date no such written authorization in hard copy has been issued. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Andy Oram: Getting U.S. Universal Service to Work
(Hi, I added U.S. in the title because Andy is referring to the USA, not to the 'universe' or this planet in particular. Universal access mean access within the border of one nation. /geert) From: Andy Oram [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5217 Getting Universal Service to Work The notion of universal service in communications has great staying power. Although the term universal service itself has fallen into disfavor--I'll explore why in just a minute--the commitment to the concept remains high, even in our troubled economic and political times. Just try going to the [85]Thomas legislative information site and do a search for bills containing the word broadband. Most of these bills are striving for some form of universal service, such as high-speed Internet in rural areas. But a parallel political universe in universal service has also arisen. A number of researchers in recent years, mostly on the political right, have critiqued the long-standing ideal of providing everybody with communications. * In the 1990s, Milton Mueller published a series of papers, followed by the book Universal Service: Competition, Interconnection and Monopoly in the Making of the American Telephone System, that presented a bold claim--and an economic analysis to back it up--that the universal service policies undertaken by the phone company from the very start did nothing to improve actual phone system coverage. * A [86]policy analysis for the Cato Institute by Lawrence Gasman argues that the problems in providing phone coverage have been exaggerated, and that the policies intended to create universal service have been counterproductive because they prop up outmoded networks. * Economist Hal Varian has also stated that geographic subsidies should not be created toward the goal of universal service, because the availability of communications should be treated like the many other factors people use in choosing where to live and work. No one gets a parking garage subsidy from the government for choosing to live in a major city, so Varian asks why they should get a communications subsidy for choosing to live in an isolated rural area. * Most damaging of all, perhaps, are [87]reports of fraud and abuse in the one explicit universal service program mandated by law in the United States, the E-rate program for schools and libraries. (The law also provided funds for rural health clinics, but that was spun off into a separate program.) These critiques offer serious food for thought and a chance to re-engineer programs toward what's most effective. That the spirit in which they are offered is in no sense constructive does not reduce their importance. It would be easy to argue that the attacks are part of an ideological, corporation-friendly campaign to paint everything governments try to do for their citizens as bureaucratic, wasteful, and pointless. But approached with open eyes, the critiques can lead us closer to universal service. FCC Chair Michael Powell, consistent with his free-market views, has cast aspersions on the universal service ideal, most famously with his joking complaint about suffering from a Mercedes divide. But in other comments, he's suggested that there's value in policies aimed at getting advanced communications to people who lag behind. The key lesson from surveying the available history is this: universal service programs that enforce a narrow strategy, and that distort economic realities to favor that strategy, do indeed risk the kinds of failures claimed by political opponents of universal service. Such programs can reward the wrong things and set up an environment ripe for abuse and waste. On the other hand, flexible strategies that reward creative thinking and keep everyone's focus on the prize can be surprisingly effective. Let's look at the principles of universal service and at some recent efforts to find out what should continue and what should be discarded. In defense of the universal service principle Transit systems are routinely subsidized in countries around the world--and the United States is no exception. While the Federal, state, and local governments pour most of their transit billions into automobile traffic (with airlines getting handouts too since the September 11 attacks), there is also substantial funding for buses and train lines. Governments clearly see a social good in transportation. And the reasons for the importance of transportation go quite deep. Mobility is key to the modern employment market. People who can travel easily can find work in new places and still keep in touch with their families. Businesses benefit from transportation too: they can open
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops [3x]
Table of Contents: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshop Andrew Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Felix Stalder [EMAIL PROTECTED] Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops John [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 15:22:28 -0400 From: Andrew Ross [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshop Felix, Fair enough, I accept the analysis, though would add the following. Not everything that comes out of China is outsourced. Most Chinese service firms stand on their own two feet (as Mao used to say). They may not have finessed their marketing pitch, hence the awkward language of this spam ( as I recall it). On the other hand, the awkward language may well have been ventriloquized by some canny Western scamster who wants prospective customers to think they can take advantage of an underwitting Asian shop. As with so much Internet flotsam, we will never know, but our interpretations do say a lot about our assumptions. AR/ Andrew, Rana, I know nothing about this particular outfit other than its email advertisement, so calling it a 'sweatshop' was more an act of parody a la 'spam kr!it!k' rather one of analysis. The subject line 'business' seemed rather bland. Yet, it was also not random, as the message struck me for several reasons. First, paintings are treated like any other commodity whose costs can be lowered by outsourcing production into a low-wage country. So also for art, Southern China becomes the 'low cost manufacturing base.' Second, like many other low-end businesses, this proposition is spewed about randomly as spam. In fact, nettime got it several time (that's why I noticed it). Third, it contains some rather untrustworthy claims such as the painting being done by 'famous artists', though they remain unspecified. Most importantly, though, it introduces an extreme separation -- extreme in the context of Western art, more common in the textile industry -- between ordering and producing. While made-to-order art has never entirely gone out of fashion with the artist becoming an autonomous subject (so the story line) it has been transformed into an intimate process ( as in having your portrait painted). As such, it's based on a supposedly deep relationship between the person doing the ordering and the one doing the execution. Now, this email indicates that two things are happening. The made- to-order relationship is reappearing with all the loss of status that entails for the artists (a 'famous artist' yet anonymous, like the great medieval artists/artisans). Yet, at the same time, this relationship has been broken under the cost-imperative. This allows to enjoy the product which, like a brand, has a status value much higher than its use value, without any regard to the context of its production. While this is not a sufficient cause to assume sweatshop production conditions, it's a necessary step to establish them for the production of high-value objects. Felix On Sunday 01 August 2004 18:03, Andrew Ross wrote: Re: the subject line. Just a matter of interest, why do you assume this is a sweatshop operation? Simply because it is in China? Or is it impossible to imagine the condition of Chinese artisans as comparing favorably with their Western counterparts? ... -- +---+-+--- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 16:15:36 +0200 From: Felix Stalder [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops Andrew, as far as I know, 'outsourcing' doesn't imply some kind of dependent relationship. In fact, the whole thing about outsourcing is that services which were previously provided in-house are now provided by an external company. This does not fit precisely to the service producing oil paintings, but the general logic still applies: something that used to be provided close to the consumer of the service is now produced somewhere else, distance, managed in real time by IT. The imperative is cost reduction by reducing labour costs at the expense of increased transportation costs. I agree, it's not impossible that his a fair business posing as a sweatshop to take advantage of stereotypes
Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops
I always thought of sweatshops as a creation of the American South. Maybe that's because I grew up in the seventies with the film Norma Rae being my first introduction to the world of textile mills. But according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the term is derived from the verb to sweat, used as a descriptive management technique in the factories of 1850s England. Sweating the workers became common in the US, the entry goes on to say, in the 1880s with the arrival of large numbers of eastern and southern European immigrants. Talking about Manhatten garment shops, probably. So I think you're right, John. The term doesn't seem to have any particular geographical or national identity embedded within it. Rather, it seems that it is a term that becomes applicable whenever and wherever the conditions of industrialization and the power of employers together make the super exploitation of laborers possible. I think I even remember some sound byte from a radio show or some media piece somewhere asking the question of whether China is now the world's sweatshop. Which right away implies, even in popular usage, that sweatshops are not new, and haven't always been Asian or even Third World. Dan w. Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 17:11:51 -0700 From: John [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: nettime The Art of Sweatshops A sweatshop is a factory, usually in a developing or Third World country and especially in Asia, where people work for a very small wage, producing products such as clothes, toys, shoes, and other consumer goods. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
