kerkko.fi

Arguably the most pervasive element enabling exploitative office culture is the postmodern trickery of the contemporary working environment. [The Slovenian philosopher] Slavoj Žižek argues that modern employment tactics create the illusion that our employer is our friend. This fabrication empowers the employer while denying the employed the right to vocalize and protest dissatisfaction of their working conditions. “You’re not going to stick around and help out? I thought we were a team? I thought we were friends?”

Žižek suggests that the environment of the workplace has been twisted, using architectural devices, to manipulate employees. Kitchens, "break-out spaces," lounges, free food, free coffee -- all this is a postmodern sleight of hand designed to manipulate and disarm staff. By fabricating the illusion of employer as friend, the employed is denied the opportunity to protest, argue, fight, be adversarial, and demand more of their working conditions. These informal spaces are political spaces of control, surveillance, and manipulation.

Lowell Bergman has investigated News Corporation for PBS Frontline. He depicts Rupert Murdoch's British operation as a criminal enterprise, routinely hacking the voicemail and computers of innocent people, and using bribery and coercion to infiltrate police and government over decades. Enemies are ruthlessly "monstered" by the tabloids. Bergman also spoke to NPR's Fresh Air. But the hits keep coming: in recent days News Corp has been accused of hacking rival pay TV services and promoting pirated receiver cards in both the UK and Australia. With the looming possibility of prosecution under America's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, how long will shareholders consider Rupert Murdoch irreplaceable?

You can arrest Andy Coulson, you can sack two hundred journalists, and take the News of the World off the face of the earth, but the problem will not go away. News is in crisis, but believing that it is a crisis stemming from the lies, deceitfulness, and illegality of hacking is misplaced. Understanding the roots of the crisis requires a critical interrogation of the terms on which newspapers in operate.

Read the rest of this post »

There is an address in Cheyenne, Wyoming -- 2710 Thomes Avenue -- where 2,000 companies are based. But it is not a skyscraper. Or even an office complex. It is a basic, 1,700-square-foot brick house. And it is the subject of an investigative report by Reuters called "A Little House of Secrets on the Great Plains."

One of the reporters on the project, Brian Grow, says it looks like a typical home -- until you go inside. "Lo and behold, the corporate suites for the companies that are registered at that address are in fact cubbyhole mailboxes, floor to ceiling in the main room," Grow tells Guy Raz, host of All Things Considered.

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/02/137573513/shell-game-2-000-firms-based-in-one-simple-house

Shell Game by Npr

(download)

Click here to download:

NPR_ATC_110702.mp3 (2.27 MB)

Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer. Derek Parfit’s entirely secular arguments, and the comprehensive way in which he tackles alternative positions, have, for the first time in decades, put those who reject objectivism in ethics on the defensive. His book, On What Matters, is an intellectual treat for anyone who wants to understand not so much “what matters” as whether anything really can matter, in an objective sense. Parfit’s real interest is in combating subjectivism and nihilism. Unless he can show that objectivism is true, he believes, nothing matters.

http://rdd.me/apwdijij

Read the rest of this post »

A new report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) warned that the "independent watchdog function that the founding fathers envisioned for journalism" was at risk in local communities across the US. The report said there was a "shortage of local, professional, accountability reporting" that could lead to "more government waste, more local corruption," "less effective schools," and other problems. The 475-page report is the product of an 18-month effort to explore the turmoil sweeping the traditional media business in the US.

Read the rest of this post »

The world's four largest grain traders, responsible for the vast majority of global corn, soya, and wheat trading and processing, have been accused of large-scale tax evasion in a landmark series of cases being brought against them by the Argentinian government. With the global food system and who controls it under intense scrutiny because of record prices, the legal battle with the "ABCD four," as they are known, has taken on heightened significance.

Ricardo Echegaray, director of Argentina's revenue and customs service, Afip, has given a detailed account of the charges his department is bringing against ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. "These companies have gone into criminality," Echegaray said. "2008 was when agricultural commodities prices spiked and was the best year for them in prices, yet we could see that the companies with the biggest sales showed very little profit in this country."

Echegaray said he had evidence from his detailed inquiry that all four traders had submitted false declarations of sales and routed profits through tax havens or their headquarters, in contravention of Argentinian tax law. He also alleged they had on occasion used phantom firms to buy grain. He further alleged that they had inflated costs in Argentina to reduce taxable profits or claim tax credits there.

The chronic crisis in the cocoa industry has contributed to Côte d’Ivoire's slide into civil war in two ways. First, and most significant, the persistent poverty and stagnation causes war. Second, the ethnic tensions, which arose in the cocoa industry itself, gave unscrupulous politicians the chance to make a bad situation even worse, for their personal gain.

At the moment, the world cocoa price in London is high, roughly CFA 1,600 per kilo. The farmers are lucky if they get half of it for their sacks of beans. The Ivorian agents of Cargill, ADM, and Barry Callebaut offer much less than the world price. The corrupt government takes a big bite in "official" taxes. Finally, the farmers pay bribes at police roadblocks.

Côte d’Ivoire over the past decades has done just about everything mainstream Western economists suggested -- and it remains trapped in poverty. The country concentrated on growing and exporting products it was "good" at, cocoa and also coffee, instead of trying to industrialize. But the chronically low world prices for these products kept the country poor.

With better prices -- a little more like what protected and subsidized farmers in the US and Western Europe earn -- millions in the cocoa-growing regions of Côte d’Ivoire could have started to consume more themselves, which in turn would have promoted local industries, reduced unemployment, and gradually raised the country's standard of living.

Every time those in the more prosperous parts of the world buy chocolate, we are exploiting the people who produce it. As long as we continue to tolerate this injustice, there will be no peace in Côte d’Ivoire. The crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is representative of deeply rooted structural problems in many other African nations.