02 MAY 02: NOW THAT’S
PROGRESS! — CA. SUPREME COURT RULES NIKE CAN’T LIE

From the LATimes:

Nike Can’t Just Say It, Court
Rules

Law: Firms can be found
liable for deceptive public statements, justices decide. Critics call the
decision a blow to free speech.

By MAURA DOLAN, Times Staff
Writer

SAN FRANCISCO — Corporations
can be found liable for deceptive advertising if they make misleading public
statements about their operations and conduct, the California Supreme Court
ruled Thursday.

    In its
4-3 decision, the court said Nike and other corporations are not protected
by the First Amendment when they present as fact statements about their
labor policies or company operations in advertisements, press releases,
letters to the editor or public statements.

    “If a
company is going to issue press releases or any information to the consumer
about their factories, they are going to have to tell the truth,” said
Alan Caplan, the plaintiff’s attorney in the case. “That shouldn’t upset
any corporation.”

    The ruling
is expected to increase public scrutiny of corporate image campaigns. But
critics said it also will prevent businesses from engaging in pubic debate
on isues that affect them.

    No other
state high court is believed to have ruled in such a case, and a Nike lawyer
said the firm is likely to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    The decision
“sets a dangerous precedent by restraining companies, such as Nike, from
making public statements about their business practices when challenged
in the arena of public debate,” the company said in a statement.

    The court’s
ruling came as a result of statements Nike made to defend itself against
charges that its products were made in Third World sweatshops.

    Several
media outlets published critical stories about working conditions in Asian
factories where Nike’s athletic shoes are made, prompting Nike’s response.
A San Francisco activist contended that Nike lied in its press releases
and letters to newspapers and athletic directors, and sued the company
for false advertising.

    The corporation
argued that its statements were protected by constitutional guarantees
of free speech. Lower courts agreed and dismissed the lawsuit.

    The state
high court, however, said Thursday that the statements were commercial
in nature and subject to a broad California law that prohibits misleading
advertising.

    When
a corporation makes “factual representations about its own products or
its own operations, it must speak truthfully,” Justice Joyce L. Kennard
wrote for the majority.

    Without
deciding whether the athletic shoe and apparel maker lied in its statements,
the court revived the lawsuit, which could lead to a trial and possible
restitution.

    …Labor
and environmental groups presented arguments against Nike in the case,
Kasky vs. Nike, while the American Civil Liberties Union sided with the
corporation.

    The case
arose in 1996 with a report on “48 Hours,” the CBS television news program,
about conditions in factories under contract with Nike in Southeast Asia.
Articles about the workers who make Nike shoes also appeared in several
newspapers.

    The stories
cited claims that the workers were paid less than the applicable minimum
wage, required to work overtime, subject to physical, verbal and sexual
abuse and exposed to toxic chemicals.

    Nike
countered in public statements, ads and letters that the factory workers
were paid in accordance with local labor laws and on average received double
the minimum wage plus free meals and health care.

    Marc
Kasky, 57, who has managed a foundation that preserves San Francisco’s
Ft. Mason, decided to sue Nike after reading an article in the New York
Times about the company’s contract factories.

    If Kasky
ultimately prevails at trial, Nike could be ordered to turn over an unknown
amount of profits it has made in California. The money then could be distributed
either to charities or to consumers who bought Nike products, lawyers said.

   
The state high court relied on U.S. Supreme Court precedents to distinguish
speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment from commercial speech, which
government can regulate and ban if it is false.

   
The California court said speech can be commercial even if it is not in
the form of an advertisement.

    Communications
are subject to government regulation if they are made by a commercial speaker,
such as an officer of a company, intended for a commercial audience and
contain representations of fact that are commercial in nature, Justice
Kennard wrote for the majority.

   
“Speech is commercial in its content if it is likely to influence consumers
in their commercial decisions,” Kennard wrote. “For a significant segment
of the buying public, labor practices do matter in making consumer choices.”

    At the
same time, she said, the ruling “in no way prohibits any business enterprise
from speaking out on issues of public importance or from vigorously defending
its own labor practices.”

    Nike,
in a press release, said it was “extremely disappointed” by the ruling
and stressed that the accusations are unproven.

    The manufacturer
also said it has made significant progress in its contract factories since
the lawsuit was filed in 1998.

    The company,
which has contracts with more than 700 factories in more than 50 countries,
said it forbids child labor and has raised wages by more than 40% over
the last several years for entry-level workers in Indonesian shoe factories.

    Caplan,
an attorney for Kasky, said the ruling will affect corporate public relations
across the country.

    “They
can’t say, ‘We are issuing this for everybody’s ears except those people
under California Supreme Court jurisdiction,'” Caplan said.

    Al Meyerhoff,
a plaintiffs’ lawyer who also worked on the Kasky case, said corporations
should be held accountable if they lie.

    “If companies
are claiming their goods are manufactured under certain conditions–no
clear cutting or organic food or free from child labor–if those statements
are being made, they should be true,” Meyerhoff said.

…

Justin Broadrick of Godflesh/Final/Techno Animal recently suffered a nervous breakdown [see April 30], causing him to cancel an entire US tour and ultimately to end Godflesh the band. The following is from an
interview he conducted sometime in the months prior to his breakdown :

“You look at Streetcleaner which is, I think, still one of the most nihilistic albums ever made. You
look at the frame of mind I had then — I was fairly young when we made
that record, 19 or so when we wrote most of that material — and there
is a pure nihilism in there. Totally anti-everything. I couldn’t come to
terms with anything. It was all a struggle, and I just wanted to lash out
at every target I possibly could.

    I’ve
grown up a fair amount since that record and what I can tell is that, like
everyone, I was just searching for some truth, some form of spirituality.
Searching for some answer to that big fucking emptiness that is part of
most people’s lives. For me, it’s a lot of soul-searching stuff, desperately
trying to find something beyond the flesh, beyond just everyday life. The
Soul. Energy. Everything. I’m still not coming up with any answers and
there is that frustration of not coming up with any answers. [Laughs]

    I’ve
always maintained that — for a lot of people and particularly me — music
is just a catalyst. I really do find that it is some form of energy and
I’m just trying to be very pure about it, to not think about anything and
let the music just come out of your soul. You have to try not to force
anything. Using the sort of sounds that we do — the dirt and the filth
of the sound — is really intentional. The whole texture of Godflesh is
premeditated and highly thought about and always has been since day one.
I have always found Godflesh to be a very spiritual sort of thing. Particularly
in a live situation — because, obviously, it is all about volume again
— what I’m looking for is transcendence. Definitely. That’s what I hope
people get from it as well. But not in any dogmatic fashion. The whole
context is free. That’s the sort of energy I draw from music. It’s the
one medium that does transcend everything, and I can really feel like I
can not be “me” anymore through music and really be outside the mere mortal
human being that I am. Godflesh is definitely a way of escaping myself.
Sometimes that is what I’m searching for: going beyond myself. [Laughs]
Particularly myself.

    But it
is not just about escape; it’s about trying to find more, knowing that
there is more. Music of this sort of power — this sort of abstraction
— is a weapon. It’s a vehicle for all these sorts of energies.

What about something like
your really minimal work under the Final moniker?

Final is, for me, just as
emotional as Godflesh, but obviously stripped of virtually everything.
It’s just trying to get down to the sounds you hear everywhere. It’s the
soundtrack to existence, basically — the silences and the spaces between
things. That’s almost what I’m searching for there: super minimal, super
self-exploratory. It’s very personal, but also mood music, you know? It’s
music that can be applied to situations or certain moods.

    This
is why I make so much music, so much different stuff. It reflects my listening
tastes, really. The way I use music for different moods myself is how I
sort of make music. I want to hear things that fit my moods. Everything
I do has that function. Music for me is very functional as well as being
very spiritual and ritualistic. It’s the only sort of magical process that
I can use. I’m an intensely ritualized person anyway. Everything for me
is about ritual. Music has to have the same sort of function.

Do you think the kids
are missing that sort of element in their lives?

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I
think people generally do anyway. Or, if they do search for it or find
it, they end up with some sort of shitty religion or something. Essentially
people are sheep; they want something to believe in. And I guess, to some
extent, I do as well. I know ultimately that any sort of truth is in you,
in yourself, as opposed to some great deity. I think people miss spirituality.
I actually detest any sort of organized religion. It has fucked mankind
since way back. Before that, when people were writing on rocks and worshipping
the sun and the moon and the planets, they had it more sorted. I think
people got it then. Once people started to dominate other people, it all
turned to shit.

Looking at any of your
work and the repetitive nature of it — well, what has been classified
as repetitive — the “looped” nature of it, you can see that it is an attempt
to push the listener outside themselves.

That’s it. Most of the music
that I do — and Godflesh being the most important of all that — is extremely
mantra-like. They have that element — almost a meditative element — a
very trance-like element and you either get it or you don’t. I think that
is how you can lose yourself in it. That is what I am looking for. I don’t
really talk in rock and roll terms and I don’t think what I do is rock
and roll no matter how much Godflesh is really just, essentially, a rock
band. It’s not about the celebration of rock and roll. That means nothing
to me. Music is purely a vehicle.

“Rock and roll” is an
entertainment lifestyle.

Yeah, and I think it has
its point and its purpose. It is just not something that I am a part or
that I want to be a part of. What I was saying earlier about people missing
spirituality is that I think they need religion. Without it, they are utterly
lost and would probably end up killing people or killing themselves. I
used to be very anti-control and anti-dictatorship — a very libertarian
sort of attitude — and what I’ve come to realize over the years is that
people need this sort of thing. People are mostly herd-like, and they need
to be filed away into little corners or they’ll just be killing each other.
Before we made Streetcleaner and even when I was in Napalm Death, we had
this notion that we could change the world. This naïve sort of crap.
But with Streetcleaner we sort of went to the other extreme: to the idea
of cleaning the streets of all of us. It was about wiping everything out
and being happy about it. [Laughs]

From godflesh.com —

[28th April] – Late Update – Confirmed News

“If the tour cancellation wasn’t enough, I am now able to confirm the following bad news that’s been
kicking around…

Godflesh Is No More

Over, finished, done, gone, out…

    Justin suffered a nervous breakdown prior to boarding his flight to the US.

Unable to make the trip, nevermind perform a 2 month long tour, Justin
has decided to call it quits. Godflesh is done for.

    How this affects other projects, tours and recordings is not known. It seems likely
that everything will be shelved until a later date. Again, this is official
and confirms some of the rumors floating around.

    As always, our thoughts are with Justin and we all hope for a swift recovery.”

“The self-deconstructing novel may be good for a laugh or a sub-Zen reminder of the void, but its fastidious refusal of authorial authority at best illuminates and at worst exacerbates our mythic muddle. We seem to be forgetting (what our forebears clearly knew) that the winds of pneuma call upon us to
name the parts of desire as best we can. We cannot refuse this call because Mother Nature in her wisdom (or unwisdom) unlocked the instinctual primate codes by which when we were apes we used to navigate the seas of desire.

A good myth or poem stands in for these codes, addresses our appetitive anarchies, and offers safe
conduct to some life-enhancing energy by giving it a name; and a bad one does the opposite, ‘binding with briars my joys and desires.’ But in the absence of an authoritative myth or poem, the lights simply go out and the soul is closed down: no name, no game.

In other words, we have to play; and if we refuse, our robotic bodies are simply wired up by this week’s television commercials.”

(Dudley Young, Origins of the Sacred:The Ecstasies of Love and War)

from Forced Exposure:

WOBBLE & TEMPLE OF SOUND,
JAH: Shout At The Devil CD (30HZCD 17).

“Shout At The Devil wisely colours its Arabic dub soundtrack with the addition of vocal contributions from the world recognised Natasha Atlas, Nina Miranda and Prodigy’s Shahin. This rich tapestry of collaborators are at the heart of this tasteful brew of exotic and entrancing music. Unlike
Wobble’s other recent collaborations, all of a similar ilk, Shout At The Devil contains a sinister underbelly, whereby the hypnotic melodies wind around the listener like a hissing cobra. As usual, Wobble can be found bass in hand, scoring out the songs which are then given their meat and bones via Count Dubulah’s occasional springy guitar and full-blooded programming. The title track, with Natacha Atlas on vocals takes you into the heart of the tribe like never before, delivering a healthy does of mystical
eastern authenticity.” 
$14.00

A CERTAIN RATIO: Early 2CD (SJR 60 CD). Double CD for the price of 1,
the “definitive anthology
of ACR recordings from 1978-85″. Well

packaged per the Soul Jazz standard, with a 36 booklet of historical
photos and a long interview
the band. “A Certain Ratio were the first
group (alongside Joy Division)
to sign to Manchester’s infamous
Factory Records in 1978,
future home of New Order, Happy Mondays. As
purveyors of dance music
in the aftermath of Punk, A Certain Ratio
led the field. After Punk,
a new set of groups emerged who wanted to
mix Dance music — Funk,
Soul, Reggae, Disco with the spirit of Punk:
Groups such as A Certain
Ratio, Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo and The
Pop Group were the first
UK groups to bring Dance music into their sound. In New York’s dance
clubs ACR’s ‘Shack Up’ became an
underground Dance hit in places like Paradise Garage and The Roxy,
leading to them playing live in New York’s Danceteria with seminal
New York group ESG and their first album being recorded in New Jersey
mixed by legendary Factory
producer Martin Hannett.. Here ACR first
encountered Nu Yorican Latin
percussion/street music in Central Park.
The following day ACR bought
Bongos, Whistles and Congas and didn’t
look back! Mixing Punk,
Funk and Latin percussion together to make a
unique sound. Their sets often ended in ten-minute percussion jams, occasionally dressed in
Brazilian Football gear! When Factory opened
their new nightclub, The Hacienda, ACR played at the opening night
along with ESG. A Certain Ratio were a band ahead of their time

mixing Dance music with
Punk spirit. When asked by Tony Wilson

(founder of Factory) what
ACR sounded like, style guru Peter York

replied that they sounded
‘Early’. ‘Early what?’ asked Wilson. ‘No,

just Early’ came the reply. 
Soul Jazz Records are releasing a

definitive compilation (2xCD,
2xLP) of ACR featuring classic tracks

along with lots of rare
stuff, interviews and original photos.”  $15.00

HIGH RISE: Destination — Best Of CD (TKCU 77105). “Unbelievably,
High Rise are celebrating
their twentieth anniversary this year.
Strictly speaking, they
started out as Psychedelic Speed Freaks, only
taking the High Rise name
in 1983. But, whatever — the will to a
state where uber-heaviness
and uber-speed merge into one
all-enveloping bliss haze
has been their one shining goal for a full
two decades now. Acceleration,
motor-burn, and blinding forward

motion encapsulated throuh
guitar, bass and drums. What you get is

twelve remastered tracks
of totally thrilling, full on, heads down,

speed-psych-metal mayhem
taken from their classic PSF releases. The

album also includes two
previously unreleased tracks: a studio

version of live favourite
‘Ikon’, and a new piece called ‘Heavenly

Power’. For once the superlatives
are fully deserved. High Rise are

the band that kick-started
a label and a scene. They’re the

power-trio to end all power-trios.”
— Alan Cummings.  $18

FROM PETE RELIC:

“I went to the Indians game last night and it was freezing rain, with multidirectional wind (blowing in yer face and at your back same time!) but somehow the game was not called (even after it turned to
snow) and the Tribe won.

A classic vendor walking up our section yelling:

‘NOT THE GAAAAAASMAN!!

NOT THE MAAAAAILMAN!

NOT THE CAAAAAABLEMAN!

THE BEEEEEEEERMAN!!!!!’

Well hey, why not! Nothing like an ice cold beer when you can’t feel your toes!

Lightning strikes over Old Mission Peninsula in Traverse City, Mich., on the morning of April 18 as
a strong storm front moves across northwestern Michigan.   Photographer: “…the storm front was coming right at me.”

Filmmaker Neil McFarland’s description of the erotic video on the Super Furry Animals DVD:

“The lightning illuminates the arrival of the time lord. In the strobing darkness he stumbles toward the humble house. Inside the woman who is to become the mother of Merlin, sorcerer of myth and legend , senses the strange presence and flees the apparent demon. The Doctor Who , the ‘demon’ of Tom Baker shape enters, to her pagan senses the benevolent force seems otherworldly and dark to the lone woman yet when she feels his sensitive touch……..Lost in time and lust the pair join in epic and legendary union, neither knowing their offspring shall guide the coming great kings of old Albion.

We see this awesome consummation through a veil of a modern visual language. In outlines and spot illumination, in suggestive forms and abstract metamorphosis the vision hugs the erotic horror pulsation of the climactic music. From the black canvas neon lines and seductive colour fields bleed the sensuous
descriptions of the conception of Merlin. And as mysteriously as he arrives the Time Lord leaves, leaving
behind only a legend.

I’d like it mentioned that the track has changed slightly since I made the animation. There is a sequence
where you see a lone mouth moving rhythmically, at this point on the track I received there was the sound of a lady moaning in pleasure which I synchronised the mouth to. After the band remixed for surround sound the panting appears to have been dropped leaving the mouth looking a bit out of place. Damn those meddlers !!

I moved house recently and threw away the few drawings that there were for the animation. I work in Flash using a Wacom drawing tablet to trace in sketches or simply draw straight into Illustrator and Flash. The surviving sorry little sketch (click on the front screen) shows the story board for the opening sequence. After this drawing I stopped story boarding and made it up as I went along.

Yours Sincerely,

Neil McFarland.

Neil was raised by old women in other peoples houses on a steady diet of sugar and TV. He loves all the worlds flora and fauna, especially girls and has a robust head of hair. This animation was competed in 2.5 weeks with lots of cereal and Earl Grey tea.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW:

‘The Myth of Ownership’: Challenging the Rhetoric of Tax Cutting

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

THE MYTH OF OWNERSHIP
Taxes and Justice.
By Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel.
228 pp. New York: Oxford
University Press. $25.

When President Bush, promoting tax cuts, says people’s incomes belong to them and not the government, the authors of this book say he is using fuzzy logic.

Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, professors of law and philosophy at New York University, argue in the ”The Myth of Ownership” that Mr. Bush’s rhetoric is emblematic of a tax debate that focuses on the wrong issues because it lacks a moral foundation.

They assert that a naive philosophy of ”everyday libertarianism” infects American politics with a ”robust and compelling fantasy that we earn our income and the government takes some of it away from us.” This popular myth ”results in widespread hostility to taxes, and a political advantage to those who campaign against them and attack the I.R.S.”

This fantasy grows from the acceptance by all sides in the tax debate that gross, or pretax, incomes are presumptively just and therefore the proper moral base line to begin debate. The authors say pretax incomes are morally insignificant, an idea they confess is hard to sell. They argue that ”individual citizens don’t own anything except through laws that are enacted and enforced by the state,” because without government there would be anarchy, an endless war of all-against-one that would diminish incomes and wealth, not to mention life itself. Thus it is after-tax incomes that people are entitled to own. These ideas will encounter a hostile reception from partisans in the debate of the past quarter-century, in which the prevailing political rhetoric characterizes taxes as sheer waste, an unfair drag on the most productive people and an evil.

The thoughts in this book deserve examination, especially the views of Nagel and Murphy on the self-interest each taxpayer reasonably has in the social justice purchased by hard-earned
money….

The practical problem here is that gross incomes are commonly seen as just

rewards for one’s commitment
to work, as well as one’s willingness to take
investment risks. But that
belief assumes that the market rewards each endeavor

according to its value,
an assumption that collapses under scrutiny, as the

manipulations at Enron and
Global Crossing remind us. Government enacts rules on

employment, influences interest
rates, allows widely different qualities of

education in school districts
and imposes countless policies that distort

distribution of pretax incomes
— compared with what they might be in a

libertarian world of voluntary
contracts and no government. Pretax incomes are

presumed just, the authors
posit, for the same reason slavery was once the law

of the land: pervasiveness
makes legal inventions appear to be natural law.

Murphy and Nagel say using
pretax incomes as the basis of debate defies logic,

since ”one can neither
justify nor criticize an economic regime by taking as an

independent norm something
that is, in fact, one of its consequences.” To them,

acceptance of pretax income
as a moral base line means that ”serious public

discussion of economic justice
has been largely displaced by specious rhetoric

about tax fairness,” resulting
in a ”radical climate” of tax proposals

favoring the rich.

Taxes, they write, need to
be examined in the context of government spending so

that one sees both costs
and benefits. The constitutional mandate to ”promote

the general welfare” should
guide tax policy, not theories about lowering

marginal tax rates and favors
for savers. They even argue that it may be

reasonable to tax people
with similar incomes differently if that achieves a

social good. The measure
of justice and fairness in tax, they emphasize, should

be the outcomes of tax policy,
especially whether each newborn gets enough of

society’s resources to have
a fair shot at success in life. They argue that

poverty is bad for rich
and poor alike, and that the poor, especially when it

comes to educating children,
have one of the strongest moral claims on tax

dollars.

They object to a myopic focus
in the tax debate on how tax burdens are

distributed among income
classes. In this they ignore a simple truth: for the

public such measures are
much easier to assess than is determining government’s

success in promoting the
general welfare.

The authors call the current
policy of forgiving capital gains at death ”an

outrage.” When combined
with other tax breaks for those with assets, it is,

they say, ”an egregious
injustice in the current tax scheme,” because it

perpetuates inequity and
lavishes rewards on those who are fortunate in their

ancestry but may contribute
nothing useful to society. Their solution would be a

fundamental reform: make
recipients of large inheritances and gifts pay taxes,

just as wage earners must.

Nagel and Murphy give too
little attention to the role of taxes in creating

wealth. Peace is a boon
to hoteliers, Conrad Hilton pointed out in his will.

Without vast taxpayer investments
in keeping the peace, as well as in building

roads and airports, his
fortune would have been much smaller. Many modern

billionaires owe much of
their wealth to the taxpayers for investing in

education, and the scientific
advancements on which their products depend.

Murphy and Nagel do not
examine whether it would be just to look on such big

economic winners as successful
investments of tax dollars, and then taxing these

winners to insure that society
has sufficient resources to invest in each new

generation.

Murphy and Nagel offer ideas
that would improve the national debate over how we

should tax ourselves, even
if their views never gain popular acceptance….

David Cay Johnston, a reporter
for The Times, won a Pulitzer Prize last year for

his reports on inequities
in the American tax system