Er raunverulegt lýðræði að verða til í Venezúela?

Venezuela's Path

...

Considering still another key domain of social life, media, the emerging pattern continued. A look at the daily newspapers showed that of the first 25 articles, reading from the first page forward, fully 20 were broad attacks on or highly critical of Chavez. The rest were on entirely other topics. And this was typical, day after day, I was told. The papers are privately held corporations, not surprisingly hostile toward Chavez’s inclinations. Chavez doesn’t restrict them, however, much less nationalize or otherwise take them over. The same situation holds for key TV stations. Regarding the TV stations, however, and I bet something like this will also happen with print before too long, the government has a strategy.

VIVE TV is a new station created, like Bolivarian University, by the Chavez government. We visited and enjoyed touring its facilities. The widest salary difference, from the head of the company to people who cleaned up, was three to one, but the new payment policy, being steadily if slowly enforced, was to attain equal hourly pay for all by periodically raising wages of those at the bottom until they reached parity.

VIVE has roughly 300 employees. Their equipment wasn’t like CBS, but it was certainly excellent and far reaching in its potential. The new VIVE website presents their shows, archived, for the world to see. The station’s governing body is, of course, a worker’s assembly. Workers at VIVE lacking skills are encouraged to take courses, including in film production and other topics, given right on the premises, and those facilities are also used to teach citizens from Caracas and more widely how to film in their own locales.

Indeed, the station’s mandate was to provide a voice for the people. Its shows, we were told, routinely present citizens speaking their mind, including voices from well outside Caracas, which was a first for Venezuela. To that end, VIVE undertakes lots of community training, distributing cameras to local citizens as well, so people around the country can send in footage and even finished edited material, for national display.

In some respects VIVE is like a local community cable station in the U.S., except that it is national and the élan is far, far higher, and the desire to incorporate the seeds of the future in the present structure is far, far more explicit and radical, with the employees seeing themselves as presenting to the country and the world a new kind of media that, they hope, will be a model picked up elsewhere as well.

VIVE takes no ads, “to avoid being controlled.” There is actually, on the shows, much criticism of the government, since the shows convey grass-roots opinions. But this criticism, unlike that on mainstream private stations, is honest and heartfelt, not manufactured. Rather than trying to create dissension, it is constructive.

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Þessa grein verður þú að lesa!

Fundið via GNN.

Áhugavert viðtal við Chomsky

On the Iraq Election, with Andy Clark

Noam Chomsky: ...I should just bring up a kind of a truism. No rational person pays the slightest attention to declarations of benign intent on the part of leaders, no matter who they are. And the reason is they're completely predictable, including the worst monsters, Stalin, Hitler the rest. Always full of benign intent. Yes that's their task. Therefore, since they're predictable, we disregard them, they carry no information. What we do is, look at the facts. That's true if they're Bush or Blair or Stalin or anyone else. That's the beginning of rationality. All right, the basic facts we know: when Bush and Blair invaded Iraq, the reason was what they insistently called a 'single question.' That was repeated by Jack Straw, by Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, everyone. 'Will Iraq eliminate its weapons of mass destruction?' That was the single question, that was the basis on which both Bush and Blair got authorization to use force. Within a few months this single question was answered and the answer came out the wrong way and then all of sudden...

Andy Clark: This was weapons of mass destruction you're talking about?

Noam Chomsky: Yes. Then very quickly it turned out that that wasn't the reason of the invasion. The reason was what the President's liberal press calls his 'Messianic Mission' to bring democracy to Iraq and immediately everyone had to leap on the democratisation bandwagon and it began to be described as the most noble war in history and so on and so forth. Well, anyone with a particle of sense would know that you can't take that seriously and, in fact, if you look at the events that followed, it just demonstrated that.

Endilega lesið eða hlustið á þetta viðtal.

Góðar fréttir frá Bandaríkjunum, svona til tilbreytingar

Court: No 'intelligent design' in class

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) -- "Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial.

Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said.

Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.

Esquire jarðar sköpunarhyggjuna

Greetings from Idiot America

There is some undeniable art—you might even say design—in the way southern Ohio rolls itself into northern Kentucky. The hills build gently under you as you leave the interstate. The roads narrow beneath a cool and thickening canopy as they wind through the leafy outer precincts of Hebron—a small Kentucky town named, as it happens, for the place near Jerusalem where the Bible tells us that David was anointed the king of the Israelites. This resulted in great literature and no little bloodshed, which is the case with a great deal of Scripture.

At the top of the hill, just past the Idlewild Concrete plant, there is an unfinished wall with an unfinished gate in the middle of it. Happy, smiling people are trickling in through the gate this fine morning, one minivan at a time. They park in whatever shade they can find, which is not much. It's hot as hell this morning.

They are almost uniformly white and almost uniformly bubbly. Their cars come from Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio and Illinois and as far away as New Brunswick, Canada. There are elderly couples in shorts, suburban families piling out of the minivans, the children all Wrinkle-Resistant and Stain-Released. There is a clutch of Mennonite women in traditional dress—small bonnets and long skirts. All of them wander off, chattering and waving and stopping every few steps for pictures, toward a low-slung building that seems from the outside to be the most finished part of the complex.

Outside, several of them stop to be interviewed by a video crew. They have come from Indiana, one woman says, two toddlers toddling at her feet, because they have been home-schooling their children and they have given them this adventure as a kind of field trip. The whole group then bustles into the lobby of the building, where they are greeted by the long neck of a huge, herbivorous dinosaur. The kids run past that and around a corner, where stands another, smaller dinosaur.

Which is wearing a saddle.

It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.

This is very much a show dinosaur.

The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become "charter members" of the museum.

Ég mæli eindregið með að fólk lesi þessa grein í heild sinni.

Pinter segir það sem segja þarf

Nóbelsræða Harolds Pinter er skyldulesning. Heyrirðu það, SKYLDULESNING.

Hana finnurðu hér:
Harold Pinter – Nobel Lecture - Art, Truth & Politics