Andrew Rowell

Andy Rowell is a freelance writer and investigative journalist. He has over fifteen years experience writing on political, environmental and health issues.

Top 5 Musicals Produced By the Oil Industry 

Ah, the oil industry. While most people are resigned to the knowledge that large petroleum manufacturers are at least partly to blame when it comes to destroying Third World infrastructures, propping up meritless dictators, or encouraging blind consumerism in the face of an environmentally poisoned and diseased future ? the question I often ask is 'What about the music'?

And while they are fiendishly scarce, the oil industry, like many other bastions of capitalism, indeed produced a number of privately pressed, in-house motivational musicals, and several squeaked out on LP (for employees only, of course). They're known as industrial shows: lavish stage productions that serve to entertain, educate, and encourage employees to do their job with gusto.

• The Yesmen,
• oil

Occupy Los Angeles

Declaration of Occupation

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

• occupy

NYC General Assembly

The NYC General Assembly is composed of dozens of groups working together to organize and set the vision for the #occupywallstreet movement.

• street protest,
• tactical camping

The Dangers of Co-optation with Corporations 

Over 2,000 Ogoni, including their leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa have died since they started their non-violent campaign against Shell. Many Ogoni are still imprisoned today. Their only crime was to campaign against the ecological destruction of their homeland by Shell and ask for a greater share of the oil wealth that had been drilled from under their land.

• environment,
• campaign,
• propaganda,
• globalisation

The Saudi Cables 

WikiLeaks publishes the Saudi Cables

Today, Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes "Top Secret" reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom's General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. Today WikiLeaks is releasing around 70,000 documents from the trove as the first tranche.

• infopolitics,
• info-activism,
• wikileaks,
• middle east

Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation 

Free Speech TV Presents
The Historic Deep Dish Series:
Shocking and Awful: A Grassroots Response to War and Occupation
MARATHON ON SATURDAY, MARCH 23 -- REMEMBER THE IRAQ WAR

• tactical media,
• war,
• grassroot journalism,
• activism,
• independent media,
• middle east

Inke Arns

Inke Arns, curator and artistic director of Hartware MedienKunstVerein (www.hmkv.de) in Dortmund, Germany, since 2005. She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She lived in Paris (1982-86), finished school in West-Berlin in 1988, studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988-96) and in 2004 obtained her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia.

• art,
• network cultures,
• net criticism

The Brent Spar Syndrome 

Shell is not going to forget lightly its misadventures with the Brent Spar. The Oil Major was taken by complete surprise when the Greenpeace campaign against sinking that former drill platform achieved its goals. What happened to Shell can in fact happen to any corporation. Loosing control of the situation as result of the activities of a pressure group has become a nightmare scenario for the modern multinational enterprise.

• campaign,
• activism,
• net.activism