<nettime> Pandora Collected - August 8, 2003

["eveline lubbers" <evel@xs4all.nl>]

Nettimers,
some of you may be interested in the listserve I'm
running, you'll find the latest issue below.

Subscribe info is at:
http://www.oudenaarden.nl/mailman/listinfo/pandora
or just send an email to me: evel@xs4all.nl.

(Note that the list-archive is missing updates since
March, this will be repaired soon)
gr
eveline lubbers

----------------
Hi there,
Pandora is back from it's summerbreak, ready to go on.

Today a collection focussed on surveillance and repression
of anti-corporate activism, private, by the state, or somewhere
inbetween. By way of desert some news on brands, and the
announcement of a book taking strategies further where
No Logo stopped. 

For more information on the Washington right-wing thinktank
the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and their conference on 
tackling NGO's, dealt with in the latest Pandora Collected, see
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=NGOWatch.org
Our friends at PR Watch have put all the available information
together in their online wikipedia-encyclopedia

The next issue of Pandora Collected will be devoted to 
Corporate Social Responsability.
gr
eveline

1. Walking a Thin Blue Line
2. Conflating protests with terrorism 
3. Hangin' with the spies 

4. Call for Beefed Up Corporate PR to Fight at Grassroots
5. Brands on the run
6. Announcement for a book called 'logo'

----------------------------------
1.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-militia25jul
25003420,1,1633823.story

July 25, 2003
Walking a Thin Blue Line

The 11-member Oregon Rangers say they help keep order in the 
forests. Officials don't want the armed group's assist but can't stop it.

By Tomas Alex Tizon

JUNCTION CITY, Ore. — He looks just like a cop, standing there in 
his blue uniform, the silver badge on his chest glinting in the sunlight. 
There's the gun too, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he keeps 
holstered on a thick black belt. 
Paul Ehrhardt, pausing in his driveway, identifies all the doodads on 
his belt: the extra bullet magazines, the pepper spray, the handcuffs 
— almost everything a cop needs in the field. Only Ehrhardt isn't a cop.

And neither are the 10 other members of his group, which organized 
a year ago and has since roused alarm among the locals.

The group — a motley collection of gun hobbyists, volunteer 
firefighters, 
outdoorsmen and ex-military men and their wives — calls itself the 
Oregon Rangers Assn. Their self-appointed mission is to help keep law 
and order in the forests.
---cut---

------------------------
2.
Conflating protests with terrorism 
Bill Berkowitz - WorkingForChange 
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15150 

06.13.03 - You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a 
protest 
group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is 
international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that [protest]. You 
can 
almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act." -- Mike Van 
Winkle,
spokesperson, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center 
(CATIC) 

Under the guise of President Bush's all-consuming, yet amorphous, war 
against terrorism, police agencies across the country are spying and 
compiling dossiers on citizens exercising their constitutional rights. The 
Bush administration -- all war against terrorism, all the time -- has 
consistently supported policies and legislation allowing for the 
collection 
and cataloguing of data on the political, religious, or social views of 
individuals 
and organizations regardless of whether they present any imminent 
threat to 
the nation's safety. The administration has also spent obscene amounts 
of 
money to spy on its citizens while money for education and social 
services is 
drying up. 
---cut---

------------------------------
3.
Hangin' with the spies 
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com 
06.11.03 

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15139 

(....)
Given rapidly expanding post-9/11 police powers, and rampant stories 
of political activists across the country being the targets of "anti-terror" 
lists or investigations, the concern that brought hundreds onto 
downtown 
Seattle streets last week isn't fading soon. Given that the LEIU's sole 
purpose is to facilitate sharing of information amongst local police 
agencies, 
the LEIU is a natural target for questions and suspicion. It doesn't help 
that despite the dues from public law enforcement agencies, the LEIU 
itself 
is private and needs not tell anyone what it's up to. 

>From the LEIU perspective, it's all a misunderstanding. 

LEIU says it does not itself spy on anyone, or hold anyone else's files. 
Its 240 member agencies -- all of them state and local -- "collect their 
own information based on their legal parameters, whether it's local 
ordinances, 
state law, whatever it might be," Wright explains. "It's a pointer system. 
What they submit to LEIU is basic information regarding a subject 
that's 
involved or suspected of being involved in criminal activity....name, 
description, date of birth, identification, those sort of things." If Seattle 
police submit my name, and San Francisco police want information on 
me, 
what LEIU would give them, Wright says, is the name of the relevant 
Seattle investigator to call. The list of who to call about whom is kept 
by the 
California Department of Justice; there is no LEIU office, paid staff, or 
web site. 
----cut----

------------------
4.
Anti-Green PR Specialist Ross Irvine Calls for Beefed Up Corporate 
PR to Fight at Grassroots:

Environmentalists win victory of unprecedented importance and 
magnitude: PR changed globally and forever
http://www.epublicrelations.org/
Posted June 2003

Environmental activists have won a victory that's so stunning and
far-reaching that even they are amazed. It's a win that -- over time
-- will have an impact on PR across the United States, North America,
and the entire world.

Regardless of the business you're in -- biotechnology, banking,
transportation, chemical, nuclear, mining or agriculture -- you will
feel its influence. It will stifle innovation, creativity and
progress in your company or organization. And, it will change the way
you do PR on a day-to-day basis.

On June 17, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted the
precautionary principle as the basis for city and county policies.
The precautionary principle is a notoriously vague and imprecise
concept for which there are at least 23 definitions. One activist has
said, "It (the precautionary principle) is a broad ethical principle.
It can guide us all - workers and environmentalists - in a righteous
fight against corporate greed."
(....)
The San Francisco situation illustrates one of the great differences
between corporate and activist PR. Corporate PR folks are concerned
about the business, the industry, the brand, the next news cycle and
media relations. Activist PR folks are concerned about the
environment in which business, industry, the brand, the news cycle
and media relations are conducted. Corporate PR folks manage issues
while activist PR folks manage the context in which issues occur. Put
another way, activist PR folks deal with values and visions,
corporate PR folks deal with things.
---cut---

----------------------------
5.
BRANDS ON THE RUN
http://www.msnbc.com/news/938263.asp
With international opinion against the United States growing 
increasingly 
hostile and economic uncertainty looming at home, U.S. companies 
are 
becoming more worried about their appeal abroad. "In an annual 
survey 
conducted since 1998, RoperASW has been looking
for a connection between the dwindling reputation of America and the 
worldwide appeal of its top brands, from Disney to Microsoft," 
Newsweek's 
Karen Lowry Miller reports. "It had found no such link until this year, 
when 
a survey of 30,000 consumers in 30 major economies found that those 
who 
felt an increasing alienation from American culture were also likely to 
report 
a growing disinclination to eat at McDonald's, or to buy Nike shoes. 
Most 
startling, 11 of the top 12 American multinationals saw falling or 
stagnant 
scores for 'brand power,' a measure of how well they are known and 
liked, 
while nine of the top 12 European and Asian ultinationals saw their 
scores 
rise," Miller writes.
SOURCE: Newsweek, July 21, 2003

To discuss this story in the PR Watch Forum, visit:
http://www.prwatch.org/forum/discuss.php?id=1058760000

--------------------------
6.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 2 July 2003

M/C - Media and Culture is proud to present issue three in volume six 
of the award-winning M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'logo' - Edited by John Pace & Jason A. Wilson

Ever since the printing press gave us the logotype (or since even 
earlier, 
when chattels and communiqués carried the owner's specific 'brand') 
symbols have been created to condense ideas and functions of 
ownership, 
advertisement, distinction and desire. In concert with the rise and 
proliferation of capitalism, the logo gained importance, to the point
where contemporary western capital is primarily concerned with 
symbolic 
production. From a simple distinguishing mark, to seductive 
enticement, 
the logo now rides shotgun on the interface of contemporary 
capitalism.

The prominence of the contemporary logo is evidenced by the attention
given it in schools of management, design and cultural studies, by the 
feverish corporate work attendant upon brand maintenance, and not 
least by the recent focus by anti-capitalist movements on the logo as 
a ready symbol, and startling vulnerability, in the edifice of corporate 
capitalism. Naomi Klein's No Logo, a publishing sensation in 2000, 
gave a popular account of (and manifesto for) activism that focuses 
on the brand-driven multinational; groups like Adbusters modify 
advertisements to critical ends; boycotts and actions target particular 
logo-dependent corporations.

More recently, though, the "logo-centric" approach embodied in such
critiques and actions has been questioned for its effectiveness, and the
quality of its analyses. It's not only other activists wondering whether
all this reduces to a form of consumer sovereignty-style activism, but
others who want to proclaim the aesthetic value and efficacy of the 
logo
as a lubricant of flows and exchange. Is logo-based activism the new 
left-puritanism? Is it too unsystematic a critique to make real changes? 
Or is it the last, best chance to rally critique against an increasingly
pervasive and dromocratic form of capital? Is the logo the brain-candy 
of consumerism, or the latest refinement of communicative (t)arts?

The articles in this issue address a wide range of these issues. We 
invite 
you to explore the views of our contributors!

Feature Article
"Toywars"
McKenzie Wark's feature article tells the story of etoy, the Swiss
collective who through fortuity and their own taste for refusal were
thrown into a confrontation with one of the brightest rising corporate 
stars of the e-commerce boom.

Articles
"An Interview with the Makers of Value-Added Cinema"
by Danni Zuvela

"Jamming at Work"
by Susie Khamis

"The Yes Men"
by John Pace

"Leggo My Logos: The Branding of Human Culture"
by Douglas Rushkoff

"What Fucked Version of Hello Kitty Are You?"
by Lucy Nicholas

"Postmodern Puma"
by Andrew D. Grainger and David L. Andrews

"Engaging Media Spectacle"
by Douglas Kellner

"On the Relentless Logic of the Logo-Sign"
by Hélène Frichot

"Creative Industries and the Limits of Critique from Within"
by Ned Rossiter

"The Academic Logo"
by Jeremy Hunsinger

"Post-Logo"
by Craig Bellamy


-----------------------------------------------------------------
Pandora could not contain her curiousity and opened a forbidden box: 
all the evils of humanity flew out. Similarly, the Pandora Project intends 
to crack open the PR industry and spread its noxious secrets to people 
everywhere. 
Listinfo: http://www.oudenaarden.nl/lists/pandora/

Battling Big Business, Countering greenwash, front groups and other 
forms 
of corporate deception, for this book see 
http://www.evel.nl/pandora/bbb.htm

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