Approximately 225,000 people left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina flooded most city neighborhoods in August 2005. A sizeable number came from the 9th ward. Some 1800 people died during the floods; later, hundreds more succumbed to stress-related ailments. [Saul Landau]

My parents visited the US recently, and we took the opportunity to take a road-trip south through Memphis to New Orleans. Landau’s ZNet commentary of 20 July summed up much of our experience - though NOLA is such a riot of sounds and sights, a veritable sensory overload, that it’s difficult for anything to do justice to the devastation of the Lower Ninth, the opulence of St Charles Avenue, the energy (and in places the timeless beauty) of the French Quarter.

Last week at the end of my regular A Critical Ear show on WRFU I interviewed my father about our visit. It’s available now on Radio4All. I hope some of you will find it interesting, as we talk about the balance between bearing witness and voyeurism, the shame of how Katrina (and its aftermath) was handled, and more.

Here’s some more excerpt’s from Landau’s powerful piece - it’s available to subscribers to ZNet. (Consider signing up here):

The French Quarter vibrates with sounds and smells of perpetual Spring Break. Was a film crew shooting the young men and women, drinks in hands, screaming “let’s party.” No. The celebrants were acting goofy on their own, as they routinely do in Ft. Lauderdale and Cancun.

Just inside the Hustler Club doorway, two women wearing forced smiles and a few strings, stood beside the barker, trying to lure “partying” crowd members inside. “Look at the rack on these babes,” he pointed at her uncovered milk producing organs.

…

Four college-age kids, reeking of booze, shared the hotel elevator. “Join us, you’re not too old,” a young man invited. “We’ve got more,” pointing to his paper cup containing a rum drink. “We also got you know what in the room,” making an inhaling sound and putting two fingers to his lips.

The next day, we drove through the once densely populated 9th Ward, now a semi rural looking expanse of empty streets and stray dogs. Amidst boarded up houses and empty lots, we heard sounds of wind and birds chirping. Downright bucolic!

…

Shirley Jackson, president of a neighborhood council in ward 9, pointed to the vast acreage of empty lots. “Every lot used to have a home on it,” she explained. Since the government has not helped, she continued, volunteers have to do the job. She runs a mini tractor helping high school volunteers from Concord Massachusetts with their land clearing project. She pointed to a pseudo sculpture she’d erected on the site where her house once stood — a few concrete blocks in a pile.

…

A woman from Needham Massachusetts explained that she and other volunteers had come down to help “because these people need it. That’s all. Just being good neighbors.”

…

General Services Administration records prove that for two years FEMA didn’t distribute needed goods to Hurricane victims and then gave 121 truckloads of material to other agencies. http://www.planetizen.com/node/33442

HR 676 would institute a single payer health care system in the U.S. by expanding a greatly improved Medicare system to every resident.

HR 676 would cover every person in the U. S. for all necessary medical care including prescription drugs, hospital, surgical, outpatient services, primary and preventive care, emergency services, dental, mental health, home health, physical therapy, rehabilitation (including for substance abuse), vision care, chiropractic and long term care.

HR 676 ends deductibles and co-payments. HR 676 would save billions annually by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private health insurance industry and HMOs.

Anyone who’s had any sight of the US healthcare system - in my case primarily as an advocate through the GEO - knows just how broken it is. Employers keep employees on a part-time basis in order to avoid paying health insurance benefits. Insurance plans have omissions and exclusions that are difficult to understand. The people determining what coverage people have are generally employer HR units - whose primary motivation is keeping employer costs as low as possible. Unions are able to negotiate with employers to eliminate loopholes and gaps in coverage, but it’s a difficult, slow process. [At the University of Illinois the administration consistently opposes improved health coverage for grad employees, claiming that grad employees are happier with bare-bones coverage, but refusing to engage in proper surveying of grad opinions.] Patient pressure is dispersed by being routed through individual employers. And that - as Michael Moore notes in Sicko - is just the situation for those who have health insurance.

Separate to the AFT endorsement of HR 676, Citizen Action/Illinois recently circulated a pointer to Health Care for America Now!, a coalition “organizing millions of Americans to win a guarantee of quality, affordable health care for all.” It’s a more general goal than a specific bill, but very much along the same lines. Go to their website to sign up.

The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland has today (Monday, July 21st) announced its decision with regard to the award of the three national Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) multiplex contracts. The contracts were advertised by the Commission on the 7th of March last.

The Commission considered the applications received from three consortia and has awarded the contracts in principle to Boxer DTT Limited.
The award of the contracts is subject to clarifications and the successful outcome of contract negotiations, which will take place in the coming months.

Going to boxer.ie, however, it becomes clear that Denis O’Brien - who already owns 4 of Ireland’s 26 local commercial radio stations, the sole national commercial station, and the sole quasi-national commercial station (there are also 3 regional commercial stations) - has just become the monopoly operator of commercial digital television multiplexes in Ireland:

Communicorp Group is a radio holding company founded in 1989 with media and broadcast related interests in Ireland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia and Ukraine. It operates 48 radio stations under a variety of genres and has a history of innovations in programming based on escalating listener interaction. In addition, Communicorp has played on-going role in the DTT pilot.

In Ireland, Communicorp has interests in 6 commercial radio stations operating under sound broadcasting contracts with the BCI. Those businesses are operated by Radio Ireland Limited (Today FM) Maypril Limited (Spin 103.8) Radio Two Thousand Limited(98FM), News 106 Limited( Newstalk 106-108) Donegal Highland Radio Limited (Highland Radio) and Spin South West Limited (Spin South West).

…

Communicorp’s sole shareholder is Mr. Denis O’Brien, who is one of Ireland’s leading entrepreneurs, with extensive international interests in telecommunication, radio, property, aircraft leasing, golf and other leisure activities. He has an abiding interest in technology driven consumer facing markets, and a track record of successfully introducing new digital technologies in a number of countries. Over the years, Mr O’Brien has invested very heavily in supporting the indigenous Irish broadcasting sector.

As a reminder of the BCI’s stated intentions in entering the DTT process:

Under the 2007 Act, the BCI is required to licence commercial DTT in the State. In the first instance, the BCI will seek to licence three DTT multiplex operators for the establishment, maintenance and roll-out of commercial DTT in Ireland.

Thus, the award of all three multiplexes seems contrary to the BCI’s opening position. In some part, their hand was forced by the fact that:

In the case of each consortium, the applications submitted are conditional upon all three contracts being awarded to the applicant group. (BCI Press release 2 May, 2008)

It is questionable whether the BCI should have allowed its intended policy implementation to have been thwarted in this way - particularly when it results in increased oligopolistic control of the Irish airwaves.

As an aside, RTÉ, the state operator, has already been awarded a fourth multiplex to ensure “continued availability of the four existing free-to-air services in Ireland.” This indicates the presumption that O’Brien’s new multiplexes will not be available on a free-to-air basis. Coupled with the monopoly control of commercial DTT by O’Brien, it is clear to whom the benefits of digitization will accrue. The critique of spectrum licensing - made most prominently in the US by McChesney - that licensing amounts to a gift of public resources to private monopolies, seems particularly appropriate here.

The report also includes information on broadband penetration, drawing on OECD figures. Here it’s interesting to note that Ireland has the third greatest increase in penetration in the past year, although penetration rates are still somewhat below the OECD average, at 18.1 subscriptions per hundred inhabitants, compared to an average of 20.0. A major limiting factor may well be that only 31% of copper lines are DSL enabled, as opposed to an EU average of 33%, and a high in the Netherlands of over 60%.

The OECD figures are for December 2007. Comreg has collected data for Q1 2008, and claims that penetration in Ireland is now 18.6, and 22.9 if mobile broadband is included (something not yet tracked by OECD, though seemingly it will soon be included in their comparisons). Of course, mobile and fixed line penetrations should be treated differently - a DSL line into a home can enable access by all members of a household, perhaps even simultaneously, while an internet-enabled mobile device is more likely to have a single user, and of course does not (usually?) allow simultaneous connection by multiple users.

I’m also unsure of the connection speeds offered on so-called ‘mobile broadband’ services. I do note that Comreg break out connection speeds, with their definition of broadband seemingly going as low as 144kbps (presumably high enough not to include ISDN, but low enough to catch everything above it). The number of subscribers on under 1Mbps, though, is low (3.7% of residential users, 4.8% of non-residential users) and most residential connections are split evenly between the 1-2Mbps and 2-10Mbps ranges. (Non-residential connections tend to be larger, with 27% in the 1-2Mbps range and 67.7% in the 2-10Mbps range.) For those interested in the relevant weightings, 76% of broadband connections are classed as ‘residential’, though the fact that this includes 100% of cable connections indicates there may be some shortcomings in the data.

Finally, the Comreg data indicates a drop in the number of Wifi Hotspots available in the country. The drop from Q4 ‘07 to Q1 ‘08 is 2.6%. The data for hotspots doesn’t go far enough back to have a year-on-year comparison, but they were collecting Wifi Access Point figures last year (1 Hotspot = 1 or more Access Points) and the Q4-Q1 drop is 4.8% and the Q1 ‘07 to Q1 ‘08 drop is 3%, indicating that this is a somewhat recent development.

On April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government’s entire indictment against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on its face.” This means that even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept as “fact”) were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara’s ruling and will not seek any new charges against Kurtz.

For over a decade, cultural institutions worldwide have hosted Kurtz and Critical Art Ensemble’s educational art projects, which use common science materials to examine issues surrounding the new biotechnologies. In 2004 the Department of Justice alleged that Dr. Kurtz had schemed with colleague Dr. Robert Ferrell of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health to illegally acquire two harmless bacteria cultures for use in one of those projects. The Justice Department further alleged that the transfer of the material from Ferrell to Kurtz broke a material transfer agreement, thus constituting mail fraud.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five years to twenty years in prison.

Dr. Kurtz has been fighting the charges ever since. In October 2007, Dr. Ferrell pleaded to a lesser misdemeanor charge after recurring bouts of cancer and three strokes suffered since his indictment prevented him from continuing the struggle.

I’m actually going to have to tear myself away from the feed right now, but look forward to following the substantial coverage tomorrow….

This evening we headed back to the conference center - from which I write this post - where the evening entertainment consists of a stream of luminaries from media, politics, and the media reform movement. We came in late, just in time to catch the talk from the manager of Radio Arte in Chicago, which was upbeat and cheering to hear. The other speakers vary in their energy levels - Byron Dorgan was amusing and engaging, others more downbeat. It’s a strange way to spend a Saturday evening, really, but the hall is about 2/3 full, I would estimate, which indicates that most people have chosen to return for the event (or stayed on site).

As with the experience of realizing one is surrounded by tables of fellow activists, there can be something invigorating about being in such a large crowd of like-minded people. I tend to feel, though, somewhat more passion and energy in a march, where we are more participants than audience. … Strangely, as I wrote those very words, Naomi Klein spoke of the need to stop treating politicians “as celebrities, as rock stars” - that is, that the public should have an active relationship with their politicians, pushing back and shaping their actions and policies. As she puts it, “the greatest gift you can give Barack Obama” is to keep the pressure on, so when he talks with Wall Street backers he can say “I’ve got to do it - they’re crazy out there.”

That, of course, is a large part of why I’m involved with community media - not to pressure Obama, or politicians specifically, but because an active public, the members of which understand themselves as active players in society on an ongoing basis, shaping their own realities, rather than spectators occasionally called on to cast a ballot one way or another on a pre-set menu of options.

Update: They’re ending with a progressive preacher, who’s told us he’s hopped up on red bull, and it’s a good thing, I think. He’s talking about drawing strength from others when activists get tired of fighting. “What can we do to build a stronger movement for change? …. We can find the strength to keep going…. through unity. What does that mean? …. In the words of John Maxwell, unity is made real when we are able to come together in spite of our differences… Unity allows us to accept that even though… we come with different agendas… even though there are times we we do not agree we are still on the same side. …. You see, obstacles are the things we see when we take our eyes off our goals.” He’s referenced (and seemingly hit home with many in the audience) cases of fights over speaking order and press conferences, disputes over a group’s logo being left off a flyer.

Interestingly - to me - he’s now talking about the need for people to occasionally remember the moment that led them to decide to join the progressive movement (seemingly in order to make sure they stay on track). I’m constantly intrigued by this very question. I was brought up in a political family, so left-wing values - and action to match it - have been part of my experience as long as I can remember. However, so many activists I know have come from apathetic or conservative backgrounds. What is it - what moment of awakening - that brings people not only to change their world-view, but to be encouraged into action to support their vision.

I got in a little late - no surprise - but caught the talk from the Reclaim the Media speaker, Karen Toering, who talked about their use of events (film screenings, parties, play dates for parents) to draw in those who might not otherwise attend a ‘meeting.’ Just as I heard at last week’s AGEL conference (where grad union leaders met in Urbana) the reminder to capture names at each event seems very basic, but is a key point to building a network of activists and supporters. Leveraging links to established groups - building on their capacity and networks - is of course a delicate political balance on occasion (how do you reach out to those networks, in a way that’s seen as mutually beneficial, which relies I think on getting ‘buy-in’ from leaders and gatekeepers, so that they will grant access to mailing lists, or to speak at meetings, etc.).

The Q&A session at the moment is addressing the complicated question of how to mesh radical activists with more moderate participants within a single network. Again, links to other organizing in the response, as mention is made of the Gay Rights movement, where direct action and lobbying both played roles, even if different participants prioritized different events.

Tracy from The Media Mobilization Project had some great quotables. Noting the seeming paradox of almost unlimited potential for expression online paired with increased media consolidation: [This is] “ultimately making the right to be head more important than the right to free speech.” Her closing riposte: “Movements begin with the telling of untold stories.”

To which I would note that the organizing approach is all about listening to those stories, encouraging individuals to tell their stories to each other, and to use those stories to identify desired changes and actions.