Tagged!: The State, Technology, and Intelligence Gathering

Here is the presentation I prepared supposedly for an RTD with the Foundation for Media Alternatives. Unfortunately for me, it turned out to be a more informal talk than a series of presentations from invited attendees.

Tagged!

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: security state)

I used wikipedia and about.com extensively in researching some details on SIGINT. Hope this will be useful to all.

Comments on the G20 Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy

I was interviewed by Judith Prescott of Radio France Internationale regarding the social movements' reaction on the G20 summit, particularly on the Philippines. It was on the context of the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) mobilization on the US embassy (see details here, and RFI's article here) in response to the global call to action against the summit.

Here is the interview:

Comment: James Miraflor of Freedom from Debt coalition in Manila

15/11/2008 by Judith Prescott

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, right, chats with his Finance Minister Jim Flaherty as Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown chats with aides prior to Saturday's start of the G-20 summit on the world economy in Washington. (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)


Here is the article:

World financial crisis
Finance summit to discuss boosting world economy
http://www.radiofranceinternationale.fr/actuen/articles/107/article_2147.asp

Article published on the 2008-11-15
Latest update 2008-11-15 15:24 TU

Sarkozy (L) Bush (C) and Barroso at the White House
(Photo: Reuters)

Leaders of the G20 group of the world's dominant economies meet in Washington on Saturday to discuss how to tackle the world economic crisis. They are expected to commit themselves to stimulate their economies and tighten up financial regulation but discussions are expected to continue for several months.

Back to the Nation-State

Excerpted from the first draft of Fight Back: Reclaim and Expand the Lost Social and Economic Gains, Surge Forward Towards a New Economic Platform, a Freedom from Debt Coalition analysis paper written by the Debt and Public Finance Team (James Miraflor and Emman Hizon).

Directions for the System 

Now that the neoliberal system is going haywire, two directions are being presented in the status quo. The first direction, reasoning that it is not the direction but the intensity of pushing forward that is the problem, pushes us towards further market fundamentalism and advances the neoliberal project towards its completion – the total global economic integration and the absolute dismantling of the remaining free trade barriers.

We are now seeing how this paradigm works on how the rice crisis managed to do what trade talks failed to do – a unilateral reduction of crop tariffs of several countries – a solution forwarded by IMF-WB. Neoliberalism is still being presented as a solution, and in fact the problem is being portrayed as the half-hearted effort in implementing this philosophy of governance. This portrayal may not seem so obvious now, but it had been obvious before the collapse of main US investment and insurance houses.

Fiscal Dictatorship

The Scarcity of Fiscal Democracy in Post-EDSA Philippines

By James Matthew Miraflor

Researcher, Debt and Public Finance Campaign

Freedom from Debt Coalition

End Arroyo's Fiscal Dictatorship - FDC

The Post-EDSA regimes are usually contrasted with the undemocratic rule of late strongman Ferdinand Marcos. An important testament to this claim of post-EDSA democracy is the so-called “power of the purse” – the power to allocate national resources – granted to the legitimate proxies of the people, the elected members of House of Representatives. This is supposed to be a marked divergence from the Marcosian authoritarian power over the budget, a power that was eventually wielded for crony-patronage and dreams of grandeur.

Wat’tup Cuba: Thoughts on the Cuba, Revolutionary Socialism, and the Filipino Youth

By James Matthew Miraflor

Note: These are only a few chapters of an unfinished paper based on my presentation (of the same title) during the Philippines-Cuba Cultural and Friendship Association (PHILCUBA) of the Moncada Attack last July 26, 2008 in the University of the Philippines Manila, Little Theater.


…

"The argument is this. The only way to know if the people genuinely chose socialism as a model of political and economic governance is on the presence of other modalities – other ideologies outlining other ways of organizing societies. If socialists are indeed confident of the superiority of their socialist model, as all socialists should be, and if they are confident that the masses also believe so, then they need not be afraid of contesting the democratic space from those with other ideologies, as organized through other parties."

Group wants debt moratorium, 6% GNP education spending

06/02/2008 | 10:56 AM

http://www.gmanews.tv/story/98619/Group-wants-debt-moratorium-6-GNP-education-spending

MANILA, Philippines - With one week to go before classes start, militant anti-debt youths demanded that President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo follow the United Nations' benchmark to spend six percent of gross national product on education.



The Youth Against Debt (YAD) also reiterated the call for a moratorium on paying "illegitimate" debts, instead of having President Arroyo calling for a freeze in tuition hikes.