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Al Giordano
Latest on the narcosphere
October 25, 2004
Please Distribute Widely
Dear Colleague,
Today we publish Part II of
our seven essays from "We Are Everywhere," the book
that chronicles the growing radical social and political movements
across the globe over the past ten years
Take notes, kind reader: the
hour has come to prepare ourselves for the blessed post-election
era that comes in ten days, when we can start making progress
again for authentic democracy, authentic journalism, and to end
the US-imposed "war on drugs."
If you missed Part I of this
series - "Emergence: An Irresistible Global Uprising"
- it's available, now, on page one of Narco News, along with
the next installment - "Networks: The Ecology of the Movements":
http://www.narconews.com/
We're all very excited by how
much public and reader interest we've received in recent days
regarding our publication of this important work by the Notes
from Nowhere collective that authored and edited "We Are
Everywhere" (Verso Press).
Do you know that between the
time we published the first essay on Thursday and this weekend,
the book's sales ranking at Amazon.com climbed from #262,000
to #26,000 - bypassing 237,000 other books in the line in two
days?
Our friends at the Authentic
J-Store report having received many orders there as well (where
you can still get the book, including free shipping and handling)
at:
http://www.salonchingon.com/giftshop/index.php?city=ny
You might say that these fast
developments are just one tangible result of having built a global
*network* over the past four-and-a- half years but, of course,
the authentic victories can't be measured in mere economics
And that is what this essay
is about: the construction and use of networks, how the network
model operates so totally distinct that of from "organizations"
or other more traditional forms of collaboration I am writing,
of course, about the boredom-inducing old ways of seeking social
change that too often create bureaucracies that begin to mirror,
become co-opted by, or turn into, the evil forces they first
set out to oppose.
I started to "get"
this concept of networking as a journalistic and political weapon
ten years ago, when, wanting to find out more about the Zapatista
indigenous rebellion that had begun in Southeastern Mexico, and
being new, in 1994, to the Internet, I subscribed to an email
list with the quirky name of "Chiapas-L."
Back then, there were no graphics
or photos or video or audio on my little used Apple computer
(and yes, Virginia, there weren't any of those obnoxious pop-up
ads either!), connected by a phone line to the Internet. There,
one could read something called ASCII text: imagine this, kids
it was words only!
Suddenly, on a given day or
night of 1994, 1995 or 1996, the rebels would send out a communiqué
from the jungle and it would appear immediately on that email
list and at my desk far away in the Boston Phoenix newsroom.
Then somebody would translate
it from Spanish to English and other languages.
Then it would spark solidarity
actions around the world. International gatherings were convened
deep in the Lacandon jungle - invitations flew across the fledgling,
ever expanding, networks - to which people would come from the
five continents and then disperse again back to their own lands
better armed in knowledge, ideas, tactics, and inspiration for
the struggle.
It didn't take too long before
I got down there, South of the Borders, myself. The rest is a
story known to longtime Narco News readers This intercontinental
ballistic online newspaper grew out of that network, and created
yet other ones putting drug policy reformers (coca growers, harm
reduction workers, legalizers... even some presidents and congress
members!) throughout the hemisphere in contact with each other
for the first time constructing a powerful and horizontal network
of Authentic Journalists training and helping each other to be
better and safer through the School of Authentic Journalism
Of course, we lived through
at least one case for the textbooks: the mercenary lawyers at
Akin Gump and their clients at Banamex-Citibank didn't know what
hit them after our networks swarmed all over their lawsuit against
us in 2000 and 2001, stunned them, confused them, pulled them
off their traditional playing fields, and won the day for the
First Amendment rights of all Internet journalists.
Yup, the recipe ain't secret:
It was a matter of constructing networks!
In any contest between fixed
institutions and fluid networks, the networks are winning the
day. That's the Narco News story and that of many others; a defining
narrative of our era.
Beyond the Zapatistas, many
international, national, and local movements have found much
success with this same kind of network model - low on cost and
bureaucracy, high on communication and speed, allowing for and
provoking spontaneous and surprise action, and assuring that
all done on a small scale finds a greater reach beyond its moment
and geography. Certainly, the autonomy movements that have put
the "Global Trade" barons on the run have utilized,
and evolved, ever-new forms of networks to get the job done.
As today's essay on Narco News,
titled, "Networks: The Ecology of the Movements," notes,
"it was the RAND Corporation, a US military think tank,
who actually came up with the most accurate description"
for the "formless howling mob" that has shut down international
trade talks time and time again. Viewing the RAND-published book,
"Networks and Netwars," from the distinct perspective
that comes from looking up from below.
The "We Are Everywhere"
authors focus on the concept of "the swarm" (a concept
we've openly borrowed, many times, here, when speaking of "the
Narco News swarm" of Authentic Journalists on big and breaking
news stories from Bolivia to Venezuela to Mexico and elsewhere).
RAND's think-tankers, note
the authors, "predicted that swarming would be the main
form of conflict in the future. While for most commentators,
a bottom-up system that functioned so effectively was totally
outside their conceptual framework, the RAND Institute, steeped
in the latest developments of systems theory and complexity,
turned to the natural world for the best metaphor that there
is enormous power and intelligence in the swarm."
This essay embraces four axioms
as keys to successful social change:
- "More is different"
- "Stay small"
- "Encourage randomness,"
and
- "Listen to your neighbors."
We'll be discussing these concepts,
among the others raised in these essays, on the swarm-inducing
Narcosphere as we publish each of the seven parts, one after
another, trying to see how the strategies and tactics unveiled
can be better applied to journalism and the drug war.
So keep reading, and join in
the discussion. It's heady stuff, but not difficult for everyday
people llike us to understand. I know that *you* will understand
them.
(Some say that "networking"
is in our genetic coding; the authors point out some very interesting
examples, too, from the animal world of how species act distinctly
in groups than as individuals)
And, I repeat, for anyone who
really wants to win the battles and causes that concern us, to
develope a more precise understanding of how all this networking
networks is a prerequisite to effective journalism and political
action in 2004.
It's show time!
Again!
From somewhere in a country
called América,
Al Giordano Publisher The
Narco News Bulletin new email: narconews@gmail.com
Narco News is supported by:
The Fund for Authentic Journalism P.O. Box 71051 Madison Heights, MI
48071 USA
The Fund receives online donations
at this web page:
http://www.authenticjournalism.org
Apply for your co-publisher's
account, here:
http://www.narconews.com/copublisher/application.php
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Hot Muckraker: Al Giordano
(bio from 2000)
In 1978, Al Giordano, now forty-one,
was arrested for criminal trespass while protesting a nuclear
power plant in New Hampshire. He was sentenced to 100 days in
jail, but succeeded in causing enough trouble to get kicked out
after twenty. Since then, he's been causing various kinds of
trouble as a political organizer and a reporter and, in general,
continues to afflict the comfortable. Now he's being sued by
a multi-billion dollar opponent who isn't having a whole hell
of a lot more luck with him than the New Hampshire jailers.
The deal with the current litigation
is this: In 1997, Giordano had gone to Chiapas, Mexico, to hang
with the Zapatista rebels. He was then thirty-seven and had been,
until the previous year, the political reporter at the Boston
Phoenix. "I wanted out of journalism," he says, "I
had been covering politics, but nothing was happening in politics."
He began to read Spanish-language newspapers. "And I found
that even though Mexican journalists are subject to much more
repression and danger than journalists in the United States they're
far more courageous in reporting on difficult subjects like the
Drug War."
Consequently, in the spring
of 2000, Giordano launched narconews.com, a nonprofit pro-legalization
site that presents Giordano's reporting on the Drug War as well
as the best of the Latin American reporting in translation. (
"Pro-legalization is just the train," Giordano says.
"The destination is much more sweeping - authentic democracy,
peace with justice, human rights." ) The lawsuit, which
was filed in New York State Supreme Court last August by the
National Bank of Mexico - Banamex - alleges libel, slander and
interference with prospective economic advantage. The alleged
defamatory statements involve reports that major narcotics trafficking
was occurring on property owned by Roberto Hernandez, the bank's
owner and president.
It is probably safe to say
that this suit is not about money. Since filing the suit, Banamex
was sold to Citigroup for $12.5 billion dollars and Hernandez,
who ranks 387th on Forbes magazine's list of the wealthiest people
on earth, is worth about $1.3 billion. Conversely, Giordano's
most valuable possessions are a $1,200 laptop and a guitar.
It is also probably safe to
say that in filing this suit, Banamex didn't know with whom it
was picking a fight.
If you took it in a straight
line from the dissatisfaction with the world he began to express
as a student at Mamaroneck High School in suburban Westchester,
New York, to the present, the Bronx-born Giordano's biography
would go like this: In 1976, when he was sixteen, he went to
Albany and testified before a legislative commission in the state
senate against nuclear power, felt completely ignored and concluded
that the tactic of lobbying the government was futile. He was
arrested for what would be the first of twenty-seven times on
May 1st, 1977. When he was twenty and living in a cabin in Rowe,
Massachusetts, running the Rowe Nuclear Conversion Campaign,
which ended in the first-ever shutdown of an operating nuclear
power plant in America, he met Abbie Hoffman, who called him
"the best political organizer of his generation." The
two worked together until Hoffman's death in 1989, opposing U.S.
intervention in Nicaragua and fighting to save the Delaware and
St. Lawrence rivers. He also occasionally worked on political
campaigns, notably for senator John Kerry.
Around 1988, after winning
more than twenty referendums and political campaigns in a row,
it occurred to Giordano that he could also effect social change
through journalism. For the next eight years he worked as a political
reporter, ending up at the Phoenix, where he still occasionally
publishes.
Unhappy with what he saw as
the decline of journalism in the U.S., he wrote an essay to that
effect called "The Medium Is the Middleman," which
his friend the late Jeff Buckley adapted into a song called "The
Sky Is a Landfill," ( it appears on Buckley's posthumous
1998 record Sketches for My Sweetheart, the Drunk. ). Shortly
after that, Giordano moved to Mexico.
Obviously, given the sale to
Citigroup, Banamex can afford to continue filing suits against
Giordano in as many cities, countries or universes as they can
find a pretext for, effectively turning Giordano into a full-time
international defendants. "This is a harassment suit,"
says Giordano, who is currently $200,000 in debt from his legal
battles. "Narconews is the canary in the coal mine, and
if that bird stops singing, then all the miners of authentic
journalism will have to evacuate the mine."
from MAP
by: Richard Lake
The above bio was written in
the year 2000. Since then, Giordano won the lawsuit against Banamex
(a stunning victory with implications for all of us who seek
to tell the truth on-line and off-line) and has expanded Narco
News into a news source to be reckoned with. injusticebusters
covered the Banamex
story at the time and we also carry material about Giordano
on the Eminem page.
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Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
