No. 860
ENGLISH & SPANISH:
Hi Franz,
Many thanks for publicizing my appeal. I'm sure it will help get to a much larger group of likely supporters. There is, as it happens, yet another mistake I just discovered when I clicked on the link in your reprint, not a serious one, but still ... where I wrote, "The ninth one, titled 'Mutual Aid and Mutual Trust'", the correct title is "Out of the Prison!" However, it is No. 9, and the link is correct, and the quote of Einstein is right at the top, so the title may not cause too much confusion. But I'll go and correct it now.
I'm becoming more hopeful that we may be able to pull this off. We´ll see.
Abrazos,
George
"Franz J. T. Lee" wrote:
George & Al,
For your information.
Also see our VENEZUELA NEWS BULLETIN, at:
http://www.franz-lee.org/venezuela00001.html
Solidaric Greetings,
Franz.
http://www.franz-lee.org/files/pandemonium00860.html
| Subject: A way with words, and Al Giordano Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 22:16:58 -0500 From: George Salzman <george.salzman@umb.edu> BCC: (entire general list) Oaxaca, Tuesday, October 21, 2003 (date of original letter) Friends: Here we go once again. Though many of you already know me, I’m writing with the hope that this note will also reach many people who don’t know me. Nancy has a way with words. She said to me, during the past year or two, “You’re the biggest fucking cheapskate I ever met.” It’s true. I watch my expenses like a hawk circling over a barnyard in the grey pre-dawn light of early morning, as intent on holding down my living costs as the hawk is in holding down the size of the chicken population. An eagle-eyed product of my youth during the Great Depression, with an independent streak of miserliness thrown in. So what’s this all about? Well, I want to tell you why I’ve sent $1,000 to support the work of Al Giordano, tax-exempt of course, and am ready to do it again each of the next two years. Who’s Al Giordano, and who am I? I’ll start with him.
Alberto Giordano is the most inspiring person I’ve met in recent years, maybe ever, and I’m 78, so I’ve had a little experience. The on-line investigative reporting of his NarcoNews website burst like a supernova of no-punches-pulled journalism -- what he justifiably calls authentic journalism -- in the sky of América latina. Three and a half years ago he started with his laptop, telling the truth about the U.S. ‘War Against Drugs’, exposing that dirty war of Washington for what it was, and is, a war against the mostly poor people south of the Rio Grande. And telling the truth about the dirty reporting of mainstream media. He laid it all out, no holds barred, and scooped them all on the real news, again and again. And he had fun doing it. The New York Times was eating crow the day after it editorially welcomed Pedro Carmona, the wealthy coup-installed dictator-for-a-day of Venezuela in early April, 2002. Al had previously reported what was really going on, hidden and lied about in mainstream pseudo-coverage. He told how the poor people were coming down from the hills to seize back their country from ‘los golpistas’ - the military engaged in the coup. He also beat a legal attack against NarcoNews by a major drug money profiteer, the billionaire owner of the privatized former Bank of Mexico, a stunning legal victory for the first amendment rights of all on-line journalists. For more about Al, a good place to start is his interview by the San Francisco Independent Media Center on Dec 20, 2002, at http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2002/12/1552703.php. It’s also posted at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strategy/Discussion/2002-12-20Giordano.html So what’s the deal? On October 18 Narco News put out its final report. It can’t keep going as is. Al explains why in the Closing Statement, at http://narconews.com/Issue31/article886.html -- mainly money and danger to the reporters. That’s a great blow to all the segments of civil society that are working to improve the deplorable conditions under which the majority of the Western Hemisphere’s people are forced to live. We need NarcoNews. We need to know the truth. We need to counter the false perceptions of reality put out by corporate media. We have a ‘right’ to know, but we can only gain that ‘right’ through our own efforts, and those of a robust, broad-based grassroots movement of authentic journalism, like Al practiced, and, at least as important, very successfully promoted by aiding and abetting and inspiring a whole school of young journalists. And he has inspired, I’m sure, a whole school of old farts like me, too.
So who am I? Who is this Mr. Pinch Peso - the Mexican peso, that is - who’s ready to make a thousand dollar per year commitment for another two years towards the work of Al Giordano? I’m a still-rebellious but now retired professor emeritus of physics whose obsession is trying to change history so that the truth of Einstein’s assertion, “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive” will not be borne out because of human failure to think critically about the crucial issues for survival. Yes, I am obsessed, no doubt about it. I believe the achievement, for all the world’s people, of humane, sustainable survival is achievable and is the preeminent issue we all ought to be grappling with. To see where I’m coming from, a good window is probably a series of essays I’m writing. They reveal me. The ninth one, titled “Mutual Aid and Mutual Trust”, is framed largely on the basis of the quote from which Einstein’s ominous warning, which I think is justified, is taken. That essay is at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Grassroots/Infra-9.html That’s it. I’m both frugal to a fault on personal expenses (Don’t throw those leftover beans away, Nancy! I’ll eat them.) and convinced that so-called civilization is a dead end. And I don’t want humanity to perish prematurely, above all by its own hand. If a supervolcano under Yellowstone blows, we can do nothing about it. If not, then maybe we can continue until the sun becomes a red giant. We can’t alter the cosmos, but we can alter our own society’s destructiveness. We need to know reality, and then we need to change it. The whole global grassroots communications infrastructure is crucial for our - this is Paulo Freire’s word for it - conscientização - our becoming fully conscious of the reality in which we live. Al Giordano and his dynamite associates have been a major sparkplug in developing this infrastructure, and could be again, once the wherewithal were available. If we could get it together and come up with, say, a commitment of 100,000 per year for three years, I’m pretty damn sure Al and Luís Gomez and Dan Feder would be strongly tempted to revive NarcoNews and keep doing what they obviously love doing, and are so successful at. After all, they want satisfaction out of life too, and their commitment to changing this world for the better is beyond questioning. It’s time for all of us who have been better informed by Narco News to show these guys that there is real support out here, not just sympathy and words of encouragement, important though those are. Reading Narco News' closing statement, it’s clear they don't see enough commitment by us. How can we expect them to continue carrying on with ‘the landlord incessantly knocking at the door’, without any reliable backup support? I must know at least a hundred people who could, if they chose, do the same thing I’m doing without it having any significant impact on their standard of living. And many others who could make smaller commitments. There are 879 people currently on my mailing list. So, let's do it. Let’s get Narco News back in the fight for the hearts and minds of our fellow Americans, and all Americanos and Americanas Latinos. Let’s just do it! Here’s how. Send your contribution for 2004 and your pledge for 2005 and 2006 to Live Art 1st with the memorandum, For the work of Al Giordano Live Art 1st operates under Performance Associates, a tax-exempt
organization, which you can contact for further information. And please forward this letter as widely as you wish. I would welcome notes from you telling me you are contributing now, and pledging equal amounts for 2005 and 2006, and with any comments and/or advice about my effort to launch this campaign. I’ll attempt to keep you informed on how it’s going, with information on my website, in the Salz-mania subfolder of the Strategy for Revolution main folder, the same one in which this letter is posted. I'd love to see NarcoNews back on line in time to report on the 10th anniversary celebration in Chiapas of the Zapatista uprising there at midnight in the first moments of 1994. Sincerely, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to be removed from my general mailing list, just let me know. * * * Return to the opening screen of this sub-folder, Salz-mania
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Estrategia por Revolución ( in English )
Articulos en esta carpeta
1. Comunalidad y Autonomía, una compilación por Jaime Martínez Luna de tres de sus ensayos y dos declaraciónes de principios de grupos indígenes de la Sierra Norte de Oaxaca;
2. Liberándose, una traducción (en proceso) en español de Getting Free, artículo 6 abajo.
3. Salz-mánia en español, más o menos, las traducciónes de unos articulos de sub-carpeta 8 abajo.
4. Striking
Gold, un poco más historia de la génesis de la carpeta,
en un cuento breve, titulado irónicamente, y cinco subcarpetas:
5. Communality and Autonomy, una traducción (en proceso) en inglés de Comunalidad y Autonomía, artículo 1 arriba;
6. Getting Free: A sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it, un ensayo (inglés original), de Jared James, que se aparecío inicialmente (en versión preliminar) en 1996. Esto es la edición de febrero de 2002, el resultado de dos aumentaciones y revisiones; y
7. Discusión, other articles related to the two principal essays by Luna and Janes in this folder.
8. Salz-mania, articles with a sense of urgency written under the stress of the ongoing assaults by the U.S. government and its allies on the peoples of the earth..
Recibiré bien las sugerencias para hacer esta colección más rica, más útil.
Regresar a la pantella inicial del Sitio del web
this, the opening page of the Strategy for Revolution
folder, is at Introduction. My initial motivation for adding this folder to the website came from Jared James and Jaime Martínez Luna. They both wrote with great clarity, force and passion about the contemporary human condition, why it is so bad for so many people, and how to remake the world so that all people can live good lives. Key aspects of their strategies are closely related. I hoped to stimulate widespread discussion by making their work more generally available, and, beyond discussion, to thereby contribute to active developments to achieve the changes they envisioned. A little more history of the genesis of this folder is in the note Striking Gold.
The cheerful mural is one indication of health promotion efforts in Jaime Martinez's town, Guelatao de Juárez, high in the northern Sierra of the state of Oaxaca. It says: Si quieres crecer fuerte y sano come frutas y verduras - If you want to grow strong and healthy eat fruits and vegetables. Photographed in June 2002, when I was there again six months later with a different friend, also a gringo visiting from the States, that colorful upbeat message had been replaced by the sober militant proclamation in solid green letters, Conservamos nuestro maiz: no permitamos que lo asesinen - We are safeguarding our corn: we won´t let them murder it. They were well aware by then that genetically modified (GM) varieties from the U.S. had contaminated indigenous Mexican corn in the states of Puebla and Oaxaca.
But it takes more than defiant statements to stop the thrust of global capitalism. Now, October 15, 2003, less than a year later, an e-mail a few days ago from the scientifically reliable international organization, ETC (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration) stated "9 Mexican States found to be GM contaminated." It's not as though indigenous peoples, such as the Zapotec Indians of Guelatao, don't know what's happening. In fact, the struggle to change the world, to prevent its destruction, is often spearheaded by indigenous groups. It is this revolution, to achieve the better world that is possible, that is surging globally at the grassroots level. James' and Martinez's two major essays, James' Getting Free, in English, and Martinez's Comunalidad y Autonomía (Communality and Autonomy), in Spanish, were the two initial theoretical foundation blocks of this folder. Subsequently other essays and reports struck me as worth posting because of their long-term interest, and I added the Discussion subfolder. A series of essays that I wrote (still ongoing) on Building a global grassroots infrastructure, seemed worth putting together in its own subfolder. And my often frantic, near manic efforts to help try to prevent or stop the latest outrage are in the subfolder Salz-mania. The subfolders 1. Getting Free: A sketch of an association of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods and how to create it, an essay by Jared James, which first appeared (preliminary version) in 1996. This is the edition of February 2002. 2. Communality and Autonomy, a partial translation of Jaime Martinez Luna's Comunalidad y Autonomía. 3. Discussion, various items from Nov 16, 1999 to July 16, 2003. 4. Infrastructure, essay No.7 of the seriess on building the global grassroots infrastructure, and links to the other 9 completed essays, from April 21, 2001 to April 28, 2003. 5. Salz-mania, items of immediate urgency, reflecting the pressure I experienced as day-to-day events unfolded, from February 13, 2003 to October 21, 2003.
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