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The unraveling of U.S. propaganda |
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Iraq
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Frank Rich
14 May 2004
International Herald Tribune
NEW YORK
http://www.iht.com/articles/520000.html
[...] In 'Control Room', the revelatory documentary about the Arab satellite news station Al Jazeera, opening in New York this Friday before fanning out nationally, the audience is taken into the Central Command media center in Doha, Qatar, in early April 2003 to see American mythmaking in action.
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Ignoring soft power carries a high cost |
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US Government
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Chicago Tribune
By Joseph S. Nye Jr.
Published May 16, 2004
Anti-Americanism has increased sharply in the past two years. In addition to the polls, we see it in hockey fans in Montreal who boo the American national anthem, in high school students in Switzerland who do not want to go to the United States as exchange students, and in increased terrorist recruitment in the Islamic world. We are losing our soft power, our ability to attract others.
Skeptics about soft power say not to worry. Popularity is ephemeral and should not be a guide for foreign policy in any case. We are so strong we can do as we wish. Foreigners may grumble, but they have little choice but to follow. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the recent decline in our attractiveness so lightly. It is true that the United States has recovered from unpopular policies like the Vietnam War in the past, but that was against the backdrop of the Cold War. And we won the Cold War with a strategy of containment that used our soft power as well as our hard power.
More @ Chicago Tribune website (registration required) |
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Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics |
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US Government
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Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
Source:?Foreign Policy Association Event
Author:?Joseph Nye
Date: 10 May 2004
[T]here have been some very dramatic changes in terms of the democratization of technology, and that's empowered a number of non-state actors. Some of which are good; Oxfam, Amnesty International and so forth, but some of them are very bad, such as Al Qaeda. [...]
My difficulty comes more in the means that have been chosen to deal with them. I think we've chosen to focus too much on our military capacities and not enough on our soft power. Now what do I mean by soft power? It does sound like an oxymoron, but it's actually not hard to grasp.
If power is the ability to get others to do what you want, or in other words to influence them to get the outcomes you want. There are three main ways of doing that. One is you can threaten or coerce people another is to conduce people with payments and the third is to attract people or co-opt them, getting them to want what you want and that third is soft power. [...]
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Starbucks: Learning to give a bean |
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Food Industry
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The Guardian, May 4, 2004
Worldwide domination has created problems as well as profits for Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee chain that has grown from 425 to over 7,500 stores in the last decade. First comes public trust - or, more accurately, the complete lack of it. It is one of those unfortunate accidents of history that the modern anti-globalisation movement and Starbucks should both claim the same birthplace.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1209271,00.html |
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McDonalds responds to filmmakers gross misrepresentation |
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Food Industry
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PR Week USA, 05-05-2004
McDonald's has mounted an "aggressive" PR response to Morgan Spurlock's documentary Super Size Me, which hits theatres this Friday.
http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=209884&site=3 |
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Journalist fights to protect sources |
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British Politics
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The Guardian, May 11, 2004
A freelance journalist who has spent 30 years investigating the tragic sinking of a fishing trawler has vowed to resist an order to identify his sources to a government inquiry.
Graham Smith has been writing about the mystery of the Gaul, a Hull trawler that sank in the Barents Sea killing all 36 crew, since the tragedy happened in 1974.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,113686,00.html |
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AP president proposes media lobby to fight government secrecy |
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US Politics
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Associated Press,May. 08, 2004
Denouncing increased official secrecy, Associated Press
President and CEO Tom Curley unveiled a plan Friday for a media
advocacy center to lobby in Washington for open government.
"The powerful have to be watched, and we are the watchers," Curley
said, "and you don't need to have your notebook snatched by a policeman
to know that keeping an eye on government activities has lately gotten
a lot harder."
At every level of government, records are being sealed and requests
for information denied, and courts are imposing gag orders and sealing
documents, Curley said, speaking in the Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture
series.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ |
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Lobbyists Bankrolling Politics |
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US Politics
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Bush gets nearly four times as much as Kerry
Publicintegrity.org, 6 May 2004
More than 1,300 registered lobbyists have given slightly more than
$1.8 million to President George W. Bush over the last six years,
according to a Center for Public Integrity study comparing the
donations of all registered lobbyists from 1998 through March 2004.
Sen. John Kerry received $520,000 from 442 lobbyists during
the same period.
The Center's study is the first of its kind to precisely track donations
to presidential candidates from all federally registered lobbyists.
Until now, campaign finance analysts used industry coding, a method
that has incorrectly included thousands of dollars from individuals not
registered to lobby, while omitting donations from thousands of
lobbyists hired outside of traditional lobby shops.
http://www.publicintegrity.org |
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US Lobbying: Meet the Leader, Only $25K |
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US Politics
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Democrats are offering lobbyists new access to U.S. Senate leaders and lawmakers in exchange for personal contributions of $25,000, the maximum amount allowed to national party fundraising committees. |
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How Original . . .These Scholars Shared a Ghost. Who Knew? |
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Nuclear Industry
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washingtonpost.com
By William M. Adler
Sunday, April 25, 2004; Page B01
AUSTIN
Everyone has quirks. Among mine is an obsession with matters nuclear: weapons, power, waste. I've been writing about little else for several years. So I was intrigued not long ago to run across an opinion piece in my hometown daily, the Austin American-Statesman headlined "Funds for nuclear waste storage should be used for just that."
The March 4 op-ed by Sheldon Landsberger, a University of Texas professor of nuclear engineering, argued trenchantly that the government is fleecing electric-power ratepayers, who for more than two decades have been contributing mandatory fees for the development of a proposed national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Landsberger charged that a portion of the fees earmarked for the Nuclear Waste Fund is diverted to the U.S. Treasury. "Denying the Yucca Mountain project an adequate level of funding," he wrote, "is stealing money from taxpayers who were required to support the waste management project."
Strong words. Familiar ones, too. So familiar that I was sure they were entombed in the towering file of articles on nuclear waste that I, ahem, maintain. I knew I could excavate the words eventually. Or I could Google them. I typed in "Yucca Mountain" and "stealing money"; 0.11 seconds later, I had my cite: A Dec. 9, 2003, op-ed column in the State, the Columbia, S.C., daily. It appeared under the byline of Abdel E. Bayoumi, chairman of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of South Carolina. Wrote Prof. Bayoumi: "Denying the repository project an adequate amount of funding is essentially stealing money from the taxpayers who were required to support the waste management project."
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Greens blast gutless Europe - EUpolitix, 27 April, 2004 |
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EU Politics
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Swedish MEP Inger Schörling, has accused European leaders of lacking "guts" in standing up to intense lobbying over proposed public health laws known as REACH. Schörling's new book chronicles the chemical industry's strong arm tactics and US political interference. (..) Co-author Gunnar Lind, who is a campaigner on environmental issues and has worked with ChemSec, the international chemical secretariat in Sweden added, "In the process of researching this book I have looked through hundreds of documents dating back a long time and I was surprised to see that the chemical industry has had such a strong influence on the framing of the draft REACH legislation. The US chemical industry in particular has had a major impact and, along with the Bush administration, it has intervened to successfully sabotage and delay REACH."
http://www.eupolitix.com/EN/News/200404/425a614a-dcf0-4b37-aad0-747317440435.htm
http://www.eurogreens.org/cms/default/dok/8/
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To receive a copy of 'REACH: What happened and why? ' contact Inger Schörling's Brussels office on: Tel: +32 2 284 5779,
email
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Major CSR award for BP, Evening Standard, 27 April 2004 |
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Climate Change
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IT WAS hard to avoid a smile at a dinner in the National Liberal Club last week, when BP chief executive Lord Browne collected a major award for corporate social responsibility (CSR) organised by the lobby group British American Business.
The organisation's chairman, Ian Stopps of Lockheed Martin, said as he presented the award: 'The policies and practices of companies are critical in building and maintaining trust, which is a precious commodity in an increasingly uncertain world.' Neither he nor Lord Browne mentioned Shell, but everyone in the audience made the connection.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/business/articles/timid77432
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The Climate Group 27 April 2004 |
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Climate Change
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The Climate Group 27 April 2004
Tony Blair launched a new worldwide organisation to fight climate change yesterday which many see as an alternative to the Kyoto protocol, the stalled international treaty on global warming. (...)
Some at the launch remained sceptical about whether the government's actions would match its rhetoric. Later this week carbon emission caps for industry will be announced, and there are fears that they will be too lenient.
http://www.theclimategroup.org
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/green/story/0,9061,1204853,00.html
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Former Shell PR man to tackle NHS project |
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British Politics
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Patrick Barrett
11.30am Friday April 30, 2004
The Department of Health has appointed Shell's former head of global media relations to handle PR for one of the most controversial NHS projects of recent years.
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