By Ken Secor - Activist San Diego and the International Association of Machinists (Retired)

from Business Insider:

Apr. 13, 2011, 10:06 AM

Original post: The AP just fell for a hoax press release, which claimed that GE would repay the government the $3.2 billion tax loss carryforward it received. The hoax was designed to correspond with last month's controversy originated by the New York Times about how GE, despite its huge profits, was paying no taxes.

The fake press release titled "GE Responds to Public Outcry – Will Donate Entire $3.2 Billion Tax Refund to Help Offset Cuts and Save American Jobs" was posted at a site called http://www.genewscenters.com/.

It's a pretty sophisticated fake, since genewscenters.com is just one letter off from genewscenter.com, where GE actually hosts its news.

The AP then ran this:

Facing criticism over the amount of taxes it pays, General Electric announced it will repay its entire $3.2 billion tax refund to the US Treasury on April 18.

GE uses a series of foreign tax havens that the company says are legal and that led to an enormous refund for the 2010 tax year.

Some conservative pundits and blogs have tried to spin the draconian, Medicare-gutting budget of Congressman Paul Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) as somehow "courageous". As an antidote to this GOP duckspeak, Tom Tomorrow borrows from A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift's satirical essay from 1729, which suggests that the Irish eat their own children, and also from the 1973 dystopian sci-fi film classic, Soylent Green.

"To pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, I believe we should euthanize the elderly and then process them into tasty snack crackers, the profits from which can be used to finance further tax cuts for the wealthy."

Monday, April 18, The Thing @ White Slab Palace presents
Disaster Special (abroad and at home), programmed by Christoph Draeger:

Csoda Pok - PanOptic, (HU/USA, 7:20, 2002)
Helenes-Apparition of Freedom, Christoph Draeger (HU/USA/CH, 18:30, 2005)
Diviner-Adam Frelin (USA, 17:50, 2008)

Richard Prince is not the only downtown New York artist who has been party to a recent copyright/intellectual property litigation. But unlike Prince - who was on the losing end of a decision (currently under appeal) regarding the fair use of photographs appropriated in his "Canal Zone" paintings - Talking Heads frontman David Byrne favorably settled a lawsuit in which he was the aggrieved party for the unlicensed use of the song "Road to Nowhere" in a political campaign.

still recovering from those berlin nights...

MIXER: Past Futures, an immersive audio-visual experience featuring live music performance by SUN RA ARKESTRA.

Saturday, April 9

9pm - 2am

Eyebeam Art & Technology Center
540 West 21st Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues)
New York City

Limited $10 tickets on sale here.

MIXER, Eyebeam’s quarterly showcase for audiovisual performance and interactive art, goes back to the future – to the dawn of the imagined internet.

Immersion Into Noise
Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersive Noise Theory
by Yuting Zou
Published in The Brooklyn Rail April Issue 2011

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/04/books/nechvatals-immersive-noise-the...

Joseph Nechvatal
Immersion Into Noise

From Bad At Sports comes notice of BHQF's imminent arrival in Chicago.

WRONG PLACE FOR THE RIGHT PEOPLE:

Margaret Weber, Nadia Coen, Scott Lawrence, Walter Sipser, Alexandra Rojas, David Hammons, Andrea Neumann, Italo Zamboni, Ryo Arita, Shinique Smith, Tenesh Webber, Tom Weinrich.

APRIL 14 THROUGH MAY 22
Opening Thursday, April 14, 6-9pm