Thank you to Stefan Meretz for taking the time to engage at length
with my essay, "Copyfarleft, Copyjustright and the Iron Law of
Copyright Earnings." [http://www.metamute.org/en/copyfarleft_a_critique]

The main argument advanced in the essay is that artists can not
earn a living from exclusivity of "intellectual property" and that
that neither copyleft licenses like the GPL, nor "copyjustright"
frameworks such as the creative commons, can help.

The only thing, I believe can help, is workers' self
organisation, an approach that is popular among socialists
from anarchist, especially syndicalist, tendencies, and is also
supported by those who promote "Market Socialism" and
"Economic Democracy."

Unfortunately, Stefan doesn't really engage in any of the
arguments made in my essay directly, he is not for instance
arguing that either copyleft, copyright or copyjustright does
create the possibility for artists to make a living, therefore
from my point of view we seem to be in agreement on the main

Finally Got the News Saturday, June 28, 8pm, £0 The Pullens Centre, 184 Crampton St, Elephant & Castle, London SE17 Rare screening of documentary (dir. Steward Bird, Rene Lichtman, Peter Gessner) on the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, from wildcat movement to formidable independent workers organization, inside and outside the auto factories of insurgent turn-of-the-'70s Detroit.

Shot as the events were happening, the film features interviews with participants and footage from inside the plants. With speaker Brian Ashton, ex-car industry shop steward. Below are brief descriptions (with URLs) of six online texts, which combine to form a sort of virtual 'reader' expanding on the content of the film. The first three deal directly with the the Detroit events, their historical background and immediate aftermath. The last three go further into the surrounding questions of class struggle, racial politics and industrial production and its evisceration.

From epolitix.com, this has more detail on the ways in which Purnell's plans to completely privatise service delivery in welfare aim to further constrict, if not erradicate, the slim margin of self-determination for workers identified in Madame Tlank's article on this website.

Again 'responsibility' is the issue and it is not that of the private service providers but of those 'serviced' by them.(The service provider's duty is to innovate and be creative - presumably, like the homicidal 'Working Links', when they goof they get off scot free). While there are no limits to the service providers' entrepreneurial imagination, again the 'choice' that is offered to those serviced is rigged - '"Claimants should have the choice over how to get back to work, not whether they should go back to work," he explained.'

posted on the 'Everyone's Cup of Tea' blog –

http://jowlindsay.blogspot.com/2008/05/from-word-problems-for-future-hedge.html 

from "word problems for future hedge fund managers"

This post will eventually consist of a report on a meeting facilitated by NoBorders London - Resistance in the UK 's Detention Centres [http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/06/401807.html] [programme posted below] held on 24th June and links to to some of the materials circulated at the meeting covering the recent history of hunger strikes, revolts and organising within detention centres in the UK. The meeting was extremely inspiring, with several 'resistance leaders' giving accounts of their struggles against carceral detention in terrible conditions at sites such as Yarl's Wood and Harmondsworth. In the meantime, while I am writing that up, it seems worth highlighting the news of a recent riot and escape (three inmates still out) from Campsfield House and some upcoming topical actions

I'm posting Brecht's poem 'A Worker’s Speech To A Doctor' to draw attention to the recent publication of a pamphlet by the Radical History Network of North East London, The NHS IS 60: undervalued, under-funded, undermined. Including a number of accounts of organising within the NHS and without, the pamphlet 'attempts to see clearly through the manufactured euphoria which will undoubtedly emerge around the 60th anniversary in July 2008 and provide a more realistic view.' There is surely much material which could provide further reading of interest to fans of Mme Tlank's recent article on surveillance and control under marketised welfare [http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Battle-of-all-Mothers] Copies of the pamphlet can be obtained from RaHN c/o Grove Park Road, Tottenham, N15 4SL.

A Worker’s Speech To A Doctor

We know what makes us ill
When we are ill, we are told
That it’s you who will heal us.

For ten years, we are told
You learned healing in fine schools
Built at the people’s expense
And to get your knowledge
Spent a fortune.
So you must be able to heal
Are you able to heal?

When we come to you
Our rags are torn off us

Short article from Bahrain weekly 'The Gulf' in which the author of 'Super Imperialism' and 'Global Fracture' makes what is hardly the 'modest proposal' he pretends it is, and perhaps also gives a clue as to what he thought he was doing as 'economic adviser' to Denis Kucinich's presidential run. Hudson proposes that an unspecified bloc of 'Middle Eastern' state-capital should try to settle the dollar-standard blackmail once and for all by offering to buy the US out of the military infrastructure (i.e. Iraq bases) built to enforce said blackmail. A prompt and 'fair' offer, he seems to believe, might be accepted as someone's presidential campaign plank. There's no suggestion at all of why Hudson imagines that any such 'offer' would not be taken as an Act of War by US diplomacy, which long since declared that ANY hesitation in recycling petrodollars through its financial system would be treated that way.

America's Free Lunch is Over
How Should the Middle East Invest Its Oil Profits?

By MICHAEL HUDSON

Thanks to Meltdown III stalwart Jon Amsden for finding and introducing this impressionistic but telling survey of what a dollar free-falling towards worthlessness ('Monopoly money', anyone?) means in terms of everyday survival in some parts of the world.

For those who may wish to take a break from the lofty abstractions of financial skullduggery and dollar decline, here's how it looks on the fishmarket floor and in other places where the dollar was once the basic currency of international trade but is now losing its former luster.

Variant, one of the few magazines covering the grim process of stealth privatisation of Glasgow's cultural assets, appears to have been specifically targeted by one of the very privateers it criticised, and who has banned its distribution at Tramway gallery, in a highly defensive abuse of power:

"Your apartments are nice and tidy, but the stairways are covered with shit. What can you call this but a cult of space?"

– some interesting reflections on space, ludic and insightful, from Chto Delat?/ What Is To Be Done.

http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?Itemid=127&id=267&option=com_content&task=view

Reads very well with Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vorobyev's account of anti-privatisation/regen protests in St Petersburg elsewhere on metamute.org

B

Another Space. A Little Tragedy
Artiom Magun

Aeneas descends into the underworld and talks to his father Anchises, telling him about the modern age and about his wanderings, including a recent journey to Russia.

Private Eye looks back at the birth of PFI and makes a not-so-surprising discovery.

A reader alerts the Eye to a 1940s history of Benito Mussolini, uncovered by a US think tank, and makes an unkind comparison with Gordon Brown's current favourite policy.  
   
More strapped for cash than Brown ever was, "Mussolini resorted to a subterfuge to pay contractors without increasing his budget.  He would make a contract with a private firm to build certain roads or buildings.  He would pay no money but sign an agreement to pay for the work on a yeraly instalment plan.  No money was paid out by the government.  And hence nothing showed up in the budget.
    Actually the government had contracted a debt just as much as if it had issued a bond.  But because no money passed, the whole transaction was omitted from the country's books.  However, after making such a contract, each year the government had to find the money to pay the yearly instalments which ran from ten to fifty years.

This is the editorial for Shift #3, available in print version now (back issues at www.shiftmag.co.uk)

For many of us a visit to Indymedia UK is a frustrating experience. Its open publishing newswire reveals an array of bizarre opinion posts, advertisements for activist meetings, petition requests and photo stories mixed in with the odd action or demonstration report. However, the number and diversity of articles on the newswire are more than an inconvenience. Most exasperating are the countless posts obsessed with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which are telling of some of the political viewpoints we are happy to associate with.

World-Ex-Position ´08
26th of April – 15th of May 2008

A project, World-Ex-Position ´08, curated by Vienna-based artist Alexander Nikolic in cooperation with Gulsen Bal (Open Space - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte ) and Thomas Jelinek (Labfactory), is likely one of the most interesting art shows Vienna will be offering this year.

„The monolithic desire of this world-ex-position knows one aim only: the final de- and reconstruction of all formations in Austrian civil society.“ Stefan Lutschinger (media activist )

The curatorial approach