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Today the Age had this on Italy’s new PM.
As a highly respected economist and bureaucrat, Mr Monti is certainly a sterling exemplar of his kind. For critics worried about democracy, though, there has been a question about an unelected person running a nation.Concerns about the will of the people are low on the radar of today’s crisis-driven Europe. To the leaders of France, Germany and other euro zone economies, there is a more burning issue, one on which the future of Europe might depend: Can he pull it off?
Even for someone who has been avoiding mainstream news like its the plague, the ongoing economic disintegration of the EC is pretty hard to miss. There is something of a theme running which seems to go like this, if your country indulges in large scale social largesse in the form of a well paid public service, generous social welfare or is lethargic in policing and collecting tax revenues then your economy will eventually suffer, or be made to suffer. Compounding this mess has been a long term borrowing regime by certain countries who want what they couldn’t really afford at the time but found willing lenders who helped them get into debt over their heads.
A few years ago in South America we saw a series of socio/political experiments violently ended when various left leaning governments were covertly undermined. The economic intervention restored profits to the rightful recipients and prevented the contagious concepts of socialism from gaining any real traction. In Europe today we are not witnessing (yet) the same scale of forceful intervention however as evidenced by the UK’s recent headline youth unemployment rate, these are early days.
Make no mistake, balancing the books is something that means money and power remains in the hands of those who know how to use it. Making hard choices means being prepared to use force of arms to maintain order.
Berlusconi can well afford to smirk. The current need for draconian choices is a direct result of his incompetence and corruption. Is democracy under threat? When they send in the tanks we will know…
via Monti faces big task in his baptism of fire.
How self serving is this? The beneficiaries of the ABC outsourcing juggernaut disagree the move will see job losses or a reduction in the creative independence of Aunty. Meanwhile the group has been very active in lobying the federal government for more money for the ABC so it, the ABC, can spend more money on outsourced production.
So while the head of Outsourcing at the ABC, Kim Dalton admits jobs will be lost, Mr Brown says overall jobs will not be lost in the industry. So is this a win/win situation? The ABC spends less money and gets the same amount and type of production, courtesy of the expanded output from the independent private sector who assure us the production and creative staff made redundant by the ABC will work for them.
Smells fishy. How is it the independents, who presumably not only have to pay people to work but also have to make a profit can produce anything for considerably less than the ABC unless the internal production costs for the ABC are grossly inflated? If that inflated figure is due to staff costs, does that mean that the redundant staff re-employed in the private sector (but paid for government funds) will effectively get paid less? Or does it mean that ABC management has been totally inept in maintaining a lid on internal production costs, even perhaps encouraging or allowing inefficient work practices to flourish within the ABC so as to render internal productions un-competitive with outsourced material?
Frankly if the ABC cannot match the cost models of outside production houses despite 1. its recent investment in state of the art TV automation and network facilities and 2. freedom from the profit imperative where ideas are traded for lucre – then ABC management should basically be sacked for incompetence. Instead the champions of free enterprise masquerading as public officers get to lord over greater discretionary budgets while the staff of the ABC watch the creative independence of the institution dismantled so that a privileged few outsiders can grow their business.
Mr Brown glib statement that overall employment levels are unlikely to be affected will never be tested. In fact who really cares if less people work in TV, as long as they have their ABC.
Producers defend ABC outsourcing.
Joe says
Well, this will be different. I think what we saw during the GFC was a transfer of debt from the private sector to the public sector, and now sovereign debt around the world is a major issue…the question of how governments are going to fund the servicing of that debt is a major issue.
Joe, Liberal Party spokesman on the treasury admits
1. The GFC was an exercise in shifting debt from the private sphere to the public domain
2. The consequences are massive reductions in public expenditure (US deficit bill) as governments service the debt.
So explain to me again why governments had to rescue the financial system from self inflicted collapse?
via Lateline – 03/08/2011: All current trends are alarming: Hockey.
I wonder who paid for Brendan O’Neill to visit these fine shores and lecture us on the perils of censorship? He has appeared on two ABC shows while also penning his eloquent prose for the discriminating readers of the Oz. It’s curious. Did he or some agent spruke his credentials to various decision-makers at a private cocktail party or is he a known defender of truth and liberty who girds his loins in any battle against those who would impose any limitations on the “press”?
Despite my reservations about his arguments, you have to admit he is at the very least outspoken. Yet some of this article is arrant nonsense, and for starters, the line about setting up your own newspaper where
anyone with the nous and the know-how and a fundraising sidekick can press their own ideas and offer them up for public consumption
is overly simplistic, and consequently misleading. He is appealing to the same mindset that will buy into his idea that free will is incompatible with his version of media effects.
But this is also problematic. The claim that the media does not directly cause or influence human behaviour sounds very odd coming from an established media player. Furthermore, if this was the case, why would we need people like Brendan O’Neill to tell us it is so? What is to be gained by having Brendan O’Neill (a former lefty) argue the libertarian line vis-a-vis press freedom at a time when one particular part of the old-world press is under scrutiny?
The coincidence of events, a few outspoken segments on the national broadcaster’s current affairs talk shows and an opinion piece in the Murdoch owned The Australian, where he strongly defends the practices of Bolt and others could be a clue. The shadowy connection between Sky News (part owned by News Ltd) and the ABC, epitomised by what Mark Scott once said of his counterpart “we have a good working relationship” seems relevant. Again, you have to wonder why Brendan O’Neill is here, did an interested party bring him here? And who would have such an interest?
Mere speculation of course, but it will be interesting to see how many of Mr O’Neill’s talking points get embedded into the media’s narrative in the near future. Of course if we are take O’Neill at his word (as opposed to what he is doing) then we have nothing to fear since we are all free to act however we choose. But if we don’t need to be told by experts like O’Neill what to think, why is he here? Especially in the middle of winter…
No job is lonelier than defending freedom of speech in Q&A land | The Australian.
On the Greek news agency site, the Greek Reporter, Anastasia Chaini tells us 800 Greek Right-Wing Racist Blogs are under police supervision. Meanwhile AP are running this story about the rise of the ultra-right in Greece which it links with increasing economic hardship.
The xenophobic rage exploded in May, when youths rampaged through a heavily immigrant neighborhood in broad daylight, knifing and beating foreigners. The attacks left at least 25 people hospitalized with stab wounds or severe beatings. Athens has since suffered a spate of hate attacks by far-rightists.Last November, the leader of a neo-Nazi group won a seat on Athens’ city council, with an unprecedented 5.3 percent of the vote.
Make you wonder what Brendan O’Neill was thinking on Q&A last night when, after conceding that some early news reports jumped the gun in blaming “muslim terrorists” for the massacre in Norway he then goes on to say
something worse has happened since then…left leaning commentators and liberal commentators have highjacked this tragedy…have tried present right wing writers as the cause of all violence and horror in the world.
Apparently (according to O’Neill) to do so is to embrace the “media effect theory” ie certain words and images, certain symbolic representations can induce a particular course of action in the public. He labels this as “ideological highjacking” and mentioning Andrew Bolt in particular he says reading Bolt means people will die.
Furthermore, O’Neill says this has implication for freedom of expression, in particular the possibility of censorship and less press freedom arising from the liberal commentariat who are urging the sort of supervision mentioned above .
Now the problem here is having set up the stakes for his point of view. O’Neill while conceding the ethnic racial basis of Breivik’s massacre goes on to make the rather sensational claim that there can be no link between right wing commentators and such extreme violence because to say so is to assert that words kill people.
The only people who say words kill are censorious people
O’Neill writes in more detail here but I think he is missing a point.
Does O’Neill believe that words and pictures can influence human behaviour? It would indeed be quite odd if he didn’t as the editor of a medium devoted to publishing words and pictures. Perhaps the only behaviour he imagines to be influenced is our entertainment but even so he must to some extent accept that words and pictures have some effect on the viewer’s state of mind.
As humans are we completely immune to the influence of symbols? Perhaps, after all cause and effect might be difficult to prove with the utmost of certainty but surely the every day evidence, the growth of advertising and public relations for example, suggests that human behaviour can indeed be influenced by what we see and read.
 So it seems problematic to assert as O’Neill does that there can be no link between the ranting of some right wing nut cases on the internet or reporting like the Sun in London who blamed Al Qaeda for the Norway massacre. It is also difficult to see how one cannot fail to be critical of people like Bolt who likewise immediately jumped onto the suspicion that the terrorist attack in Norway was Islamic in origin.
Regardless of any lack of journalistic integrity demonstrated in assuming the massacre was the work of Islamic terrorist, it is telling that the Norway massacre quickly stopped being a terrorist act when it was revealed there was no Islamic connection and in fact the ideology of the perpetrator was a native Norwegian from the far right. If words are unimportant or cannot influence our behaviour, according to O’Neill, then why would we not use the label of terrorist to describe the behaviour of someone who committed what is in other contexts described as terrorism?
O’Neill seems to conflating two separate issues. The left commentariat were highlighting the political motivation for the way the news was initially covered which indirectly reveals the right wing sympathies of parts of the media. Yet rather than admit such leaning, those who made those mistaken utterances then proceeded to denigrate the left for what? Picking up on the way the news narrative changed when a non-islamic Breivik was identified?
What is revealed is the mainstream media is imbued with a “natural” tendency to associate all terrorism with Islamic groups and thus perpetuate the conventional logic that only Islamics are terrorist, or worse, create a suspicion that all Islamics are terrorists. But rather than admit this, the focus is then shifted onto the left wing and liberal commentators rather than discuss any influence the right wing through the media might have in creating the public environment that breeds people like Breivik.
The censorship issue that O’Neill should be addressing is more insidious than an imagined police state. It is the self censorship of the mainstream media that represses left agenda items as un-newsworthy or uninteresting while permitting discriminatory “othering” of our fellow human beings on the basis of their race, colour, religious belief or gender.
While the mainstream media continues to be the mouthpiece of the corporate world then its institutionalised right wing bias will remain and the public narrative will continue to be based on right wing agenda items, such as the terrorist threat posed by the Islamics.
British lawmakers on Friday demanded that James Murdoch clarify why testimony he gave to a parliamentary committee probing the phone hacking scandal conflicted with a statement from two former executives.
Sounds serious. I mean the whole idea of a testimony is to uncover some truth and when the testimony from one person doesn’t marry up with the testimony of another party then you have to ask why, if you want to get some idea of the truth.
But there clearly is another way. Having got a statement from Murdoch jnr and found that it doesn’t agree with two statements from his former executives, then the charitable British are WRITING to James, “Please sir, could you spare us any embarrassment and get together with everyone and give us a coherent story?”
Failing that James could just stand his ground and deny everything, which is most likely and the public will be left with a suspicion that someone is telling porkies. A suspicion.
The poms, believing as they do in fairness and so on, are highly unlikely to convict James and Rupert on the basis of a suspicion. You can be totally sure behind the scenes every effort is going into damage control for News Ltd and keeping this a totally British affair would have to be the next stage of such a process.
So while News Ltd interests in Britain may now be under siege, the main game is keeping News clean in the states. So far that seems to be working, helped in part by the debt ceiling debacle.
Which as Jonathan Weed (yeah right!) puts it
So, it’s come to this: after weeks of work, congressional Democrats and Republicans have failed to reach a debt-ceiling compromise. The event that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner called “unthinkable” last week — a U.S. default on its debt obligations — has started to look pretty thinkable. In other news, the House spent Thursday afternoon renaming post offices. (Sources close to Speaker John Boehner explained that the Titanic deck chairs were not available on short notice.)
If you were a comedian, the US government financial mess would be pure gold but for the rather serious nature of the problem and the fact that some US politicians and their supporters are prepared to risk the financial stability not only of the US but the wider global economy as well in their stand.
I doubt whether a technical default by the US would usher in a worker’s revolution in the US but it will certainly destabilise the rest of the planet. The Chinese are no doubt watching this unfold with very keen interest and the US reputation as a global super power is looking distinctly ordinary.
via AP Virginia News | nvdaily.com.
via nerve.com.
Despite the fact that
Murdoch’s testimony given in parliament last week has already been called into question by two ex-News of the World executives, who say he was aware of evidence that showed the hacking was not limited to a couple of "rogue" individuals.
James Murdoch is unanimously re-confirmed as chairman of BSkyB. Maybe the possible cost of paying out News Ltd 39% stake had something to do with it but it’s hard not to see this as an indication that in 6 months the Murdochs will be back to their worst.
Judicial inquiries I hear you ask. Well if any big fish get fried by that little exercise then I’ll bring the chips.
via James Murdoch confirmed as BSkyB chairman | Reuters.
Andrew Bolt, outspoken shock jock for the Murdoch press in Oz is keen to defend Christianity against the charge that Breivik’s religious and political beliefs somehow contributed to his decision to commit mass-murder in Norway. However in true Bolta style his article is long on opinion while short on facts, he seems far more concerned with painting all in sundry with the “left” tag and he saves most of his spite for the “far-Left Crikey gossip site” and its resident marxist, Guy Rundle.
Crikey, a gossip site? Perhaps Guy got up Bolt’s nose with this article entitled “Into the abyss of the Norway massacre” where he specifically calls Bolt on his remark
“Once the identity of the attackers becomes known, the consequences for Norway’s immigration policies could be profound”
Of course an admission by Bolt on this point would be the starting point in unravelling his right wing xenophobia which is why he has to backtrack into defending Christianity against the evil Marxist blogsphere. And how better to defend yourself, why simply deny and attack without ever conceding any point of logic. It’s a tactic that works well for Bolt’s pin-up boy Tony Abbott.
Nicholas Kulish at the NYT quotes German political scientist Hajo Funke who studies the extreme right:
“This may be the act of a lone, mad, paranoid individual,” said Hajo Funke referring to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian charged in connection with the killings, “but the far-right milieu creates an atmosphere that can lead such people down that path of violence.”
Andrew Bolt does his fair share as a journalist working for the Murdoch press to create a similar atmosphere. He must decry Breivik’s actions as those of a madman for if he admits their political origins then his own extreme right wing nuttery might become a matter of public debate but one is entitled, as Rundle and others have done, to call this for what it is, an act of right wing christian terrorism.
News for Andrew Bolt. We are not bitter, we are realists who recognise what is going on. Bolt would do the world a favour if for once, he might just swallow his over inflated ego and admit his mistakes and the reasons for them. Will that ever happen?
Bitter souls hijack evil of madman | thetelegraph.com.au.
Social, not algorithms, is the basis for all human commerce. Facebook owns social. That’s got to be really, really big. At least as big as Google, and arguably bigger.
With every click on Facebook you add to their data store and increase their market reach, in much the same way as your clicks helped create Google’s data bank. As with Google, the convenience of doing something you want or need is fundamental to Facebook’s ascent. Critically, your friends in the real world are increasingly using Facebook so messaging, calling and visual sharing is now all in one place.
And as Asay points out, the lesson of Google were not lost on Zuckerberg. Facebook has kept the obvious commercialisation of the Facebook interface on the fringes. This has allowed Facebook to grow its primary asset and its core business, that is, its users.
With Myspace destined to become yesterday’s news of the IT world, Facebook has very few obstacles in its path to world domination and arguably quite a few friends. The question is, where will its competitor come from?
via Is Facebook worth more than Google? • The Register.
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