Walk into a cell phone shop in any country on earth, and walk out with a phone and service for $40. Any country, except the U.S., that is. In the United States of America, using the major providers, you pay triple or quadruple the price of a phone on the world market for the privilege of being charged exorbitant fees for years under a contract. (In India 3G service is 3 to 4 cents a minute, while in the U.S. regular service is 10 to 50 cents a minute) Any hope for change died last month with Verizon and AT&T paying to keep any competition out of the huge FCC bandwidth auction.

Around the world, phones are sold by manufacturers, and service is sold by providers. Phones take tiny interchangeable chips called Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM) making changing national location or provider with the same phone academic. In America the phones and service are almost always fixed to the provider companies with no removable chip, creating prime conditions for collusion and graft.

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By Charles Mostoller

Despite assassinations, community radio is spreading throughout southern Mexico

“Some people think that we are too young to be informed, but what they should know is that we are too young to die.”

These were the fateful words of Felicitas Martinez Sanchez and Teresa Bautista Merino, two indigenous Triqui radio broadcasters who were assassinated in southern Oaxaca on April 7th.

The two girls, aged 20 and 24, had worked for the recently inaugurated Radio Triqui, “The Voice that Breaks the Silence”, in the autonomous Triqui municipality of San Juan Copala.

San Juan Copala declared autonomy from the state government in January of 2007, unifying more than half of the 24,000 Triqui indigenous peoples into a single municipality, and has faced many obstacles—often violent—in its quest for self-determination.

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This is a huge story, which will be buried, along with her corpse.
She said she would be killed, and quick as she dies, TIME reports she swore she would commit suicide. Go in peace, dirty woman. All the Washington filth gets tiresome, the corruption and cover-ups too absurd.

Here are more odd tie-ins

And 9/11 connections.

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The sudden interest in Tibet by the global main stream media (MSM), with the Olympic protests as a backdrop, has brought on a full-blown debate that has swept from Parliaments to the Blogosphere with this long-ignored issue. The geopolitical focus of the debate, however, leads nowhere if it doesn’t factor in what is arguably the most important variable of them all: the spiritual relevance of Tibet for millions of non-Tibetan Buddhists worldwide. The global reach of the Olympic Torch protests cannot be explained geopolitically, which is why pundits, bloggers and Chinese bureaucrats just don’t get it –it’s the Buddha, stupid!

By Jordi Barrett

May 2008

Special to The East Coast Ledger

As the Torch sputters doggedly through its international “Olympic Spirit” shit parade (as invented by J. Goebbels) shielded by armies of police and sequestered for its own safety— Japan’s foremost Buddhist temple has politely refused to allow the Torch to visit its premises in solidarity with their brothers and sisters of Tibet.

“We are Buddhists, just like them,” explained a temple insider.

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