TFF global posts 2018

Via ethicalmarkets.com • In the USA, founders feared concentration of power in government.  They installed separation of powers in the US Constitution—-buttressed by freedom of the press.  The very first Amendment reinforced this free media which became known as “the Fourth Branch” of US democracy. Today, two new threats have emerged:   1):  political interference with press freedom by intimidation, propaganda from both foreign powers and domestic interest groups, advertising, planting fake news, trolling online and mainstream media using “bots” and big data analytics. Crusading media experts’ reports, such as Jacques Ellul’s classic Propaganda (1968), Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1964) on the power of advertising and television and Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (1983) all warned us of the accelerating merger and consolidation of control of US and global media.  Today the 50 owners of 90% of  US media described by Bagdikian is down to six!  The takeover of media ownership now controls most...

By David Loy Via huffingtonpost.com • What is money? We use it every day, so we must understand how it works… or do we? Perhaps our familiarity keeps us from appreciating just how strange money actually is – and how it uses us. What is a dollar bill? A piece of paper. You can’t eat it, ride in it, or sleep on it. The same is true of digits in bank accounts. In and of itself, money is literally worthless, in effect nothing. Yet money is also the most valuable thing in the world, because we have collectively decided to make it so. It is our socially agreed, and legally enforced, symbol of value. The anthropologist Weston LaBarre called it a psychosis that has become normal, “an institutionalized dream that everyone is having at once.” A dream that sometimes turns into a nightmare. – – – Needless to say, there...

By Jan Oberg • Oberg comments on the tit-for-tat policies of the U.S. and Russia when they force each other to register their media as “foreign agents”. It is a weak U.S. that cannot accept that it no longer has a virtual monopoly on shaping perceptions of the world. Just find your role and accept that there are other angles and priorities than those you’ve dominated the global information structure with fore decades. As we have said before, censorship is not the way – educating people to sense the difference between real and fake news and look for omitted news, angles and facts – in contrast – is a solution.

By Jonathan Power • When, soon after the election, President Barack Obama invited Donald Trump to the White House we didn’t learn much about their conversation. But we were briefed on one thing: Obama had told Trump that North Korea would be the most pressing and difficult issue on his agenda. How right that was. But the Americans have missed the boat. It’s as simple as that. What’s done is done. While Washington has dithered and dithered through three successive presidencies, missing opportunity after opportunity, North Korea has gone from zero nuclear weapons to an arsenal of at least 20. Its test last week of an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile is said to be capable of striking the US. It doesn’t have a nuclear tip yet but that will come sometime in the next two or three years. Just before he left office President Bill Clinton believed he was on the...

, Johan Galtung is awared the alternative peace prize, The People’s Peace Prize In Accordance With Nobel’s Will. Who is Johan Galtung Born in Norway 87 years ago. The most innovative and productive figure in international peace and conflict research. Has taught at 50 universities around the world and received 50 honorary degrees and other prizes. Consultant to a series of international organisations, the UN in particular. Author of about 160 books in fields such as peace and peace-making, security politics, violence, alternative defence, macro history, mathematics, peace journalism, future research, social science methodology, world order issues, economics and theory of science. Has been a mediator and produced peace plans in around 100 conflicts – among them Palestine-Israel, the Middle East as a region, North and South Korea, Equador and Peru, former Yugoslavia, East and West. Is the founder of Peace Research Institute, Oslo, PRIO, and the network and net...

Russia Today so you should of course not trust it but somehow this video and text and the man in it seems quite factual, not fake and obviously not omitted. It documents that Eric Emerson Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet – an American multinational conglomerate that owns a lot and among them Google – is working on “de-ranking” alleged propaganda outlets such as Russia Today, RT – the world’s third largest television network – and Sputnik. Who is Eric Schmidt? On the Wikipedia link you can read more about Mr. Schmidt, one of the richest person on earth, an advocate of net neutrality, a corporate manager and owner of a lot, a collector of modern art, etc. And you can read about his heavy involvement with Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign and the Obama administration and about Schmidt’s involvement with Pentagon, too. Eric Emerson Schmidt’s name is associated with the...

  s. That motivated Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to make a statement to the effect that “Mladic is the epitome of evil, and the prosecution of Mladic is the epitome of what international justice is all about.” But that statement is, if anything, the epitome of exemplary nonsense, pro-Muslim bias and something the UN S-G ought to distance himself from since it is a purely political statement. The media – in the West in particular – have of course lapped it up. Most media people today are too young to have any personal experience of the events some 25 years ago and would have to read thick books to understand some of it. The verdict’s political effect – whether intended or not – is to justify the horrible way the so-called “international community” intervened in the Yugoslav complex of intertwined conflicts with...

“Ministri inostranih poslova zemalja G8 izdali sudeklaraciju o principima na osnovu kojih treba da se resikriza na Kosovu. To je mesavina raznorodnih elemenata kojisluze da spasu obraz Zapada a ne doticu se ni jednogjedinog od uzroka same krize a ni uzroka zbog kojih Zapadkao medijator do sad nije imao uspeha. kaze direktor TFF-aJan Oberg. Ova deklaracija moze da posluzi jedino zato daopravda nastavak bombardovanja, a ako se ipak primeni,obecava vrlo tuznu buducnost za citavi Balkan. No, jednestvari ipak imamo u izobilju, nepismenosti u konfliktima,pa nam danas vodeci mediji i ovo nazivaju Mirovnim planomponavljajuci tako gresku iz Rambujea. U prilogu imateceloviti tekst Principa G 8 kako ih je objavio BBC, 6. maja99.  – – – – – “Sledeci opsti principi moraju biti usvojeni iprimenjeni u resavanju krize na Kosovu: * Trenutna i lako proveriva obustava nasilja i represijena Kosovu. * Povlacenje s Kosova vojnih, policijskih i paravojnihsnaga. * Razmestanje na Kosovu...