Alternative Perspective
 Issue 19, February 5th, 2003
 Compiled by Madhukar Shukla

Introduction: Alternative Perspective is an attempt to widen our awareness about issues related to business, environment, role and influence of media, geo-politics, culture, etc. It aims to share, on a regular basis, some of those pieces of news and information, which do not find place in the highly monopolised mainstream media. Please feel free to share/ forward/ distribute this newsletter to others who may be interested.



Note: The URLs of sources used in the text are numbered and given at the end of the Newsletter.

In This Issue:
  • 12 Ways in which Media Misreports War & Violence
     As another war becomes a reality, to quote Bush-Blair, "in a matter of weeks, not months", it may be useful to be aware of the lop-sided ways in which mainstream media reports war and violence. In most cases, not only the reports, but even the images are sanitized - (as these unreported images of the last Gulf War[1] show) - to maintain the myth of "clean" war with no/low "collateral damage" - read, civilian casualities. One reason of this bias is that the media industry is just another facet of the pro-war Establishment[2], comprising of the military-industrial complex. The other reason is that over a period of time, the military has also learned how media can be used to win in the PR war[3].
    http://www.alberni.net/bcooper/12ways.htm

  • The Boston Tea Party: World's First Anti-Globalization Protest
    This is a lesser known aspect of a well-known event in the history of American independence from British colonial rule. Boston Tea Party - when in 1773, a group of US citizens dumped tons of tea brought in by the British merchants into the Hudson river - was not just a protest against increased taxes on tea which Americans had to pay; it was also a protest against a globalisation regime which provided tax subsidies to the MNC - in this case, the East India Company... In many ways, this story creates a deja vu experience around what one finds happening across the world currently - only the guise of the colonialists and the colonised have changed...
    http://www.thomhartmann.com/teaparty.shtml

  • The Politics of Hunger
    In a world, where food is in abundance, why do people die of hunger and malnutrition? Partly, of course, this is because the myths of hunger[4] also exist in abundance - e.g., not enough food, population growing too fast, US Aid/Green Revolution/free trade, is the answer, etc.. But there is also another aspect which is missed out... that hunger is a political weapon[5] for the "haves" to leverage and make more profits[6]...
    http://www.earthisland.org/eijournal/new_articles.cfm?articleID=304&journalID=50

  • Have More; Waste More... the Consumer is the King
    In an era, when the level and quality of consumption has replaced the quest for personal identity, waste and obsolescence is an inevitable outcome. The paradigm of Consumer Society is so deeply embedded in the modern commercial culture, that few realise that "Consumerism" is historically a recent phenomenon[7]. Even fewer understand that keeping this factory of personal needs and dissatisfactions[8] well-oiled has become a necessity to create a pull on production system, and to keep the economy afloat.
    http://www.bconnex.net/~cspcc/empathic_parenting/waste.htm

  • PSS/23: The Genetic Code of US Foreign Policy
    "we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming... We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.": so reads this document (declassified in 1973) written by George Kennan - the Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff in 1948 (i.e., Secretary of State), the architect of American diplomacy, and the recepient of US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989... it does explain so many things...
    http://www.firethistime.org/georgekennanpps23.htm


    Other Sources Quoted in the Newsletter:
    [1]: http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_index.html
    [2]: http://www.natall.com/who-rules-america/
    [3]: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3975978,00.html
    [4]: http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/backgrdrs/1998/s98v5n3.html
    [5]: http://mondediplo.com/1998/11/01leader
    [6]: http://cornerhouse.icaap.org/briefings/10.sidebar_1.html
    [7]: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~stu/fair/consumerism.html
    [8]: http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1217/p11s1-coop.htm


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