qed’s blog

As a big maritime trading nation, we have a lot of containers in this country. Here’s a collection of shipping containers that people have turned into housing…

According to management (who tells it as it is without a word of a lie) the following changes are necessary to add content to ABC Online within the draconian budget limitations imposed by the miserable federal government. Thanks to Peter Pockley for the information.

Further to Glenys Stradijot’s message of earlier today, here are
details of the changes to RN for 2009. The trend to reduce the number
of specialist programs (all unique and of excellent quality), which
began with closure of the weekly environment program on RN a couple
of years ago, has been extended.

Peter Pockley
Science writer & broadcaster

A few people might discern a trend here, one of dumbing down content to appeal to the lowest common denominator regardless of the delivery medium. In fact the argument by management is totally spurious. Good programs are good programs irrespective of the mode of delivery. Interesting contentious reporting is not owned by any one medium. What management has clearly demonstrated (like their peers at Fairfax) is a complete disregard for the commitment and integrity of its journalists, presenters and producers in favour of some transparent ploy to get more money from the federal government. Its a bit rich of Mr Scott and his henchmen to claim (from the comfort of their palatial Ultimo headquarters - something that is after all just accommodation and facilities for the NSW and Sydney part of the ABC but occupies a large chunk of a Sydney CBD block) that these measures are necessary to bring more content online. That the proposed measure also continue the trend of sanatising the ABC (free of all those pesky dissenting voices) and homogenising the ABC content reveals another much darker agenda at work.

ABC Ultimo
Original estimate cost $130 million…
Source - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Ultimo_ABC.JPG
Author - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:J_Bar
License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Footnote - I should observe that Radio National falls within Sue Howard’s sphere of influence, but they all seem to marching to the same drumbeat. Less actual content delivered in more ways doesn’t equate to more information and thanks to Stephen Crittenden whose blasphemous remarks led to this reprimand but did bring the matter to the public’s attention.

I think maybee…

Originally uploaded by Dave in Tejas

From an outside perspective this “crisis” reads better than a good book. We are told that the US financial system (its banks) are on the brink of collapse as a direct result of the financial shinanegans that were all part of the so-called sub-prime debacle. The argument is that the collapse of a few US banks will bring the world as we know it to a grinding halt, everyone will be out of a job, soup kitchens will be the order of the day and George Bush will look more stupid than he does already.

Here in Oz our elected leaders abandoned their major climate report to make stern faced appearances before the assembled media to reiterate Oz is ok but the US needs to get is house in order or the free world will collapse. All very serious stuff! However the news coming out of the US is not all that gloomy although there is plenty to think about. For starters, people power actually worked when the congress voted against the bill to shift the debt from private banks to the federal reserve. Then there seems to be plenty of opinion that any government intervention is undesirable because it either represents some form of socialism (the epitome of evil in the US) or it is glorified corporate welfare benefiting only the mates of George W.

What seems to be agreed is that no one knows how any of this will pan out. Non intervention will force the market to self correct which might be very scary or it might not. In the long term, this might be the shot in the arm the US needed, it certainly brings the focus back to internal US political concerns which makes a refreshing change from the diet of war and terrorism that the rest of the world has been force fed since 9/11. Above all else, the matter seems to have woken up the american people to what has been going on under their noses and this has to be a good thing.

I for one hope that this event marks the time when US starts leading again, this time by example.

Apparently the Bush administration has a secret agenda in Iraq and it appears that the agenda is merely to give as much taxpayers money away as it can, a theme they really embraced with the recently new welfare class on Wall Street. Naomi Klein wrote about it in The Shock Doctrine ages ago, but it seems like some of the players are starting to go public…

American money meant to be used to train and support Iraqi army, has been diverted to foreign banks. Corruption of Malaki, of the US govt, and US funded contractors…US weapons intended for the Iraqi army sold on the streets in the markets, Director of the Oil ministry a supporter of Al Quaeda…funds from oil was given to AQ to perpetrate terror on our young men and women…Maliki shut down investigations as did high level American officials…told the Iraqi investigator not to investigate or worry because it was American money. Good God!

The head of the Iraqi Dept of Defense smuggled $600,000,000 out of the country to Jordan. Corrupt banks hid the American taxpayers’ funds. Many of the corrupt evil doers have escaped to other countries with these riches. One in particular has been id’d by Interpol as a wanted and dangerous man. He is living in the US a free man.

In news today, little George has decided that Wall St needs another helping hand courtesy of the US taxpayer to the tune of $700 billion! In a most remarkable turn of events I even heard a professional money man on ABC radio describe this little event in terms of privatising profits and socialising losses. It seems that with figures this big even dyed in the wool capitalists are choking on their American Express cards.

If this measure gets the thumbs up the US taxpayer will be stumping up for over a $1000 billion to help the stock market avoid a serious structural adjustment. That’s a lot of money and as I said before, you could do a lot of other thing with that sort of money, a theme echoed in today’s Crikey by Jeff Sparrow. But what is really staggering is not only is this money going to bail out the uber rich, it actually returns absolutely nothing of value to the people (ie the taxpayers) coughing up the money. A trillion dollars of losses get transferred off the books of businesses that have been doing some transparently fucked up things onto the balance sheet of the US taxpayer. This is equivalent to adding $20,000 of debt to every american!

George Bush, not content with ripping of the US taxpayers with his highly commercialised and singularly stupid War in Iraq, has just added another massive debt to the american people. I guess they did vote for him, so it just goes to show what can happen in a democracy. Maybe George could pop the ranch up as security? How Alan Kohler on tonight’s ABC news managed to avoid the implications of this little bit of bookkeeping whilst he was waxing lyrically about the recovery in stock markets around the globe is completely beyond belief. Are these people all living in an alternative reality? This is utterly crazy stuff.

Footnote: In case you can’t read Crikey, here’s the text (I know copyright breach blah blah - get over it this is a one off)

We’ll bail out Wall St, but let’s leave climate change to the market - by Jeff Sparrow

A few months back, The Australian gave the weekly column it allocates to climate denialists to the Czech Republic’s Vaclav Klaus. Klaus explained that “climate alarmists” needed “to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.”

Future generations (if indeed there are any) won’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The US administration effectively nationalised AIG to the tune of $100 billion or thereabouts but this isn’t the beginning of a socialist revolution. No, the Bush administration acted to prop up the rest of the stock market which might have collapsed if AIG had gone to the wall, which is what makes the development particularly sus.

AIG was in a bad way, they were left holding the bag on a whole bunch of so-called financial instruments which were underwritten by the now non-existent home loans that were extended to a whole bunch of people who couldn’t afford them. The credit growth over the last decade or so suddenly ran into the brick wall of reality and AIG were stuck with billions of dollars worth of assets that weren’t worth a thing. Zilch. Kaput!

So why should the US government buy them if nobody else wanted to be party to the biggest financial writedown in history? And importantly what do the good people of the US get in return for the money? Well it seems obvious that the move by the US Federal Reserve was meant to avert a complete collapse of the stock market, time will tell if that works, but it already seems likely that the crisis in the home of capitalism has not yet abated with news that a consortium of world central banks have popped another US $360 billion into the money market to avoid the next installment in the story. The figures just keep getting bigger. And the solutions are starting to look more like panic…

Why should any government, especially one that preaches so loudly on the efficacy of markets and the need to dergulate step in and pick up the tab? Who wins? Well the companies that don’t see their stock valuation disappear in a massive global plunge get some respite perhaps as do the fund managers who have sizeable portfolios invested in the stock market on behalf of pension and superannuation schemes. The average punter with a few shares might suffer, but it is the institutions with zillions of other peoples money at stake that are probably the most nervous at this stage, and here in lies the big rub for the western world.

The relatively recent phenomenon of spectacular and sustained growth in wealth via the stock market has suckered all and sundry into this house of cards. Governments around the globe have abandoned policies that protected national wealth as they heeded the neocon catchcry of global financial deregulation, market economies and notionally free trade. Public assets have been flogged off, government pensions replaced by private superannuation schemes and manufacturing dismantled in order to promote economies built on consumerism, driven by continuous credit. If the stock markets around the world collapse, then everyone is in deep shit because so many of our institutions are wedded to this system, whether we like it or agree with it or not.

And what happens when it does fall apart? Then the financial reserves of the biggest economies get raided. But stop and think about the money involved. $100 billion, to bail out AIG could probably build millions of houses, or 100’s of hospitals or thousands of solar and wind farms. That sort of expenditure results in tangible assets and is arguably a better way to spend public money. Instead the US government has effectively offered a very limited form of welfare that directly benefits the big players on the stock market and ends up returning nothing to the rest of the population, other than a vague assurance that the whole facade won’t come crashing down. Brilliant! What could be done with $350 billion?

The only truly delicious element to this very sorry debacle is the way that the news of it has been spread so successfully by the very agents of consumerism and manufactured consent, the mass media. Maybe we will see a sudden upsurge in some other headline grabbing news so that the Wall St wonder can quietly go about and do whatever else it needs to. What that could be is REALLY worrying. Maybe we will see the worldwide launch of a massive tree planting scheme or perhaps a wholesale shift towards sustainable agriculture and food for everyone. Maybe George Bush will grow wings and fly, perhaps the Queen will abdicate or Angelina Jolie will adopt another half a dozen needy babies. Maybe people will figure it out for themselves.

Last week Garnaut predicted the destruction of significant environmental treasures in good ole Oz, iconic features like the Great Barrier Reef and the Murray Darling River system. Today, the once Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate turned Labor Party hack Peter Garrett extended the deadline for legislative assessment for the proposed Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. As Senator Milne observed “Minister Garrett had absolute discretion on this issue. He had no legal obligation to extend the deadline, and no justification for doing so”. Garrett is about as useful to the environment as a chainsaw…

While today’s news is letting us know about the latest failure of capitalism, over in WA we can see another failure in our political system, that thing that is supposed to represent the will of the people. The breakdown of the popular vote shows that the Greens polled over 11% of the vote yet they have exactly zero members in the new legislature. On the other hand the National Party who collected less than 5% of the vote end up increasing there representation to 4. It is no wonder that governments and entrenched oppositions both resist calls for proportional representation, they would all lose out. This way it is merely the voice of the people that is being ignored.

All of the fans of so-called free markets take note, deregulation and unfettered greed spells big trouble. How blatant can the failure of capitalism be? The system is supposed to make money, hah! All that is happening is that public funds are now underwriting private profits so that the whole system doesn’t collapse. In other words, taxpayers who don’t have a financial interest in these businesses are forking out so that other businesses which they also don’t have an interest in can continue with business as usual, all because if these two mortgage companies have failed to look after their own arse.

We had a little market crash a few years back and around the world governments decided to nationalise a few things so that people generally were protected against the worst effects of failures in the capitalist model. In recent times such policies have been systematically attacked and the institutions undermined and sold off as the neocons lauded the economic miracle of the stock market. Now in the US we are seeing the whole house of cards looking very shaky indeed.

This doesn’t stop here unfortunately. Right now huge slabs of money are simply disappearing, a lot of it is money on the books of banks, superfunds and governments. All of the debt the US and others have been carrying as the consumed their way through the last twenty odd years is starting to look extremely risky right now.

A few days ago I took a small plunge and paid for a subscription to Crikey. That isn’t too remarkable, people subscribe to all sorts of things. In my case it was a considered decision, after all I can get the squatter version of Crikey forever and there are plenty of other news sites around that I can trawl for free. However the recent Fairfax decision to attack its editorial workforce illustrated what is going to be the biggest single problem with mass media in the not too distant future, the question of how to make the business of journalism pay.

Now I decided to have a quick whip around to see what else is on offer as far as paying for content on the web. Lo and behold top of the pops award goes to the AFR who will give you a year’s worth of access to afr.com for only thirteen hundred bucks! Mind you they appear to charge you about half price if you already get the newspaper version so I suppose that’s an incentive.

On the other hand the Australian is available electronically for the same price as the print version which I suppose is an improvement, except who wants a complete replication of a newspaper delivered to your already overloaded in box.

You can get the Age delivered to your doorstep, newspaper style for a $1.00 a day but strangely they don’t appear to have an online version unlike the Oz. They are not alone, if you toddle off to isubscribe you can sign up for all manner of printed magazines but not a single electronic version.

Some of this might be due to concerns about plagarism and unauthorised redistribution once something hits the web, but such concerns have not prevented things like iGoogle popping up.

A few newspapers have adopted electronic versions similar to the Oz, notably the New York Times, Le Monde and the Guardian in the UK just to name a few. They offer you a electronic replica of the paper version for a comparable price plus access to the archives. It seems like a reasonable deal but it also seems to miss the point that newspapers are the product of the print age, people who want their news via the web aren’t really interested in paying for a rehash of what they can get from a newspaper. This point was illustrated by Antony Loewenstein when interviewed recently on Newshour who suggested that younger audiences are looking for a media that reflects the values of their generation. He also made the point that young people view existing media outlets with a degree of mistrust.

Still newspapers and Radio/TV stations command a sizeable amount of advertising revenue, plus they do have substantial existing audience reach. Although the numbers might be slowly declining, they are not in imminent danger of collapse. What is evident is that a cultural shift is unfolding which is bound to bring new players and different approaches that will eventually replace the institutions we currently have. Making the web pay remains problematic and creates uncertainty but hopefully the journalistic skills and traditions will survive. Although individual bloggers are often castigated for unsophisticated and factually questionable work, it may be that as individual web sites develop and gain an audience they too become more conscious of their reputation and adopt practices that reflect the same ideals that are currently the creed of existing journalism.