by cameron | Oct 6, 2008 | Podcast
My guest on show #350 is American author (who now lives in Ireland) Richard J Moore, author of “Escaping The Matrix“. I was introduced to Richard’s work recently via an article he wrote about Russia, Georgia and South Ossetia.
Richard tells me that the kind of government we have in the USA, UK and Australia isn’t really democracy – and he suggests a way forward to creating the world’s first true participatory democracies.
Here’s a list of sites where you can read Richard’s writing and subscribe to his regular news alerts.
Richard’s “newslog” Google Group
http://cyberjournal.org
http://www.governourselves.org/
http://escapingthematrix.org/
http://www.wakingthephoenix.org/
If you want an independent media, you can support TPN by throwing me some cash to cover the bills or, if you’re tight on the cash front, by blogging or Twittering about the show or joining the G’Day World Facebook group. There is a list of things you can do to support the show here.
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
by cameron | Oct 1, 2008 | Podcast
Antony Loewenstein is an a Sydney-based freelance journalist, author and blogger whose latest book, The Blogging Revolution, is “a colourful and revelatory account of bloggers around the globe who live and write under repressive regimes – many of them risking their lives in doing so.”
{Photo:Bryan Siebel}
Sources of global dissident blogs:
Global Voices Online
WordPress.com:tag:dissident
If you want an independent media, you can support TPN by throwing me some cash to cover the bills or, if you’re tight on the cash front, by blogging or Twittering about the show or joining the G’Day World Facebook group. There is a list of things you can do to support the show here.
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
by cameron | Sep 16, 2008 | US politics
I just read this analysis by Michael Hudson, a former Wall Street economist. It’s worth reading.
I love it when America, currently run by Republicans, the ones who keep demanding the rest of the world stop propping up their industries and embrace “free market economics” if they want to become part of the WTO, the same America that equates socialism with pure evil, spends hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer’s money bailing out a publicly-listed company. Will those taxpayers end up shareholders in the respective companies? No. The money is going into a black hole, to pay the exorbitant salaries of the same greedy fat executives (like the CEO of Freddie Mac who got $20 million last year) who ran the companies into the ground in the first place. And the ones who ran the companies while they lied about the balance sheet don’t even go to jail.
When I talk with American friends about the bailout, they say the same thing – “it’s the best thing for the economy”. I always ask the same question – “why?”. And then they go… “ummm…..”. They don’t know the answer. They are just regurgitating what they’ve been told by the elite media.
Of course, if another country, say Venezuela, wanted to prop up one of it’s industries for “the good of the economy”, the US State Dept would declare them evil commies and threaten them with economic or military intervention. But oh, it’s okay when it happens in the US o’ A.
Hudson doesn’t agree that it’s the best thing for the economy. He says it’s the best thing for the big fish:
The looming defaults threaten financial institutions holding mortgages on such properties, moving up the economic pyramid to reach investors and creditors at the top. Somebody must take a loss. But who? Big fish or little fish?
Of course, the elites at the top want protection of their investments. They don’t care if $100 or $200 billion of little fish’s money disappears in the process. The people get screwed again and they smile while it’s happening.
Hudson, in his conclusion, says:
America’s $13 trillion in domestic real estate debt is no more payable than is the government’s $3.5 billion dollar debt to foreign central banks, or the public debt itself for that matter. Adam Smith remarked over two centuries ago that no government ever had repaid its debts. At that time the aristocracy – the heirs of the Viking warlords who conquered Britain and other European countries and turned their common lands into private property – held most of the land free and clear. Today, real estate has been “democratized,†but this has been done on credit. Mortgages are the major debts of most American families. In this role, real estate debt has become the basis for the commercial banking system, and hence the basis for the wealthiest 10 percent of the population who hold the bottom 90 percent in debt. That is what Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and “the market†are all about.
by cameron | Sep 14, 2008 | Australian media, Brisbane
I was on a panel yesterday at the Future Of Journalism conference in Brisbane. As you can perhaps tell from earleyedition’s tweets, my comments were not well received. As usual, I tried my best to explain that the economics of media have fundamentally changed and that means all bets are off. But, as usual, nobody listened and I was accused of being a “shock jock” espousing “revolutionary rhetoric”. Jean Burgess from QUT used the old line about “we’ve had technological shifts before and it didn’t cause the end of the industry”, completely missing the point that this is NOT about a technology shift – it’s about an economic shift.
To wit:
Fifteen years ago, if I wanted to publish something to a wide audience, the financial barriers were extreme. The cost of owning a newspaper or magazine were (and still are) very high. So very few people were able to own one. It was a limited playing field. Consequently, the people who *did* own a newspaper had the market to themselves. There was limited competition for people’s attention. As a result, they could carve their local market up between themselves and fund their business through advertising.
However, today, anyone can publish something online. The economic barriers have been removed. Consequently, there are 75 million active blogs that I can read, not 4 newspapers. And so audience attention is fragmenting and the traditional news companies can’t control it. As they lose audience, their ability to generate advertising revenue diminishes. As revenue declines, they can’t afford to maintain their old cost structures, so they start downsizing. Sound familiar? It’s a negative spiral. And there is NO. WAY. OUT.
Anyway, I’d like to thank Antony Funnell from ABC radio’s “Media Report” for doing a great job moderating our panel. He did a good job getting everyone’s views, including the ones that were extremely unpopular.
by cameron | Sep 12, 2008 | Australian media, Brisbane, media 2.0
I’m one of the speakers at the “Future Of Journalism” conference here in Brisbane tomorrow, which is kind of amusing as I’m the furthest thing you can get to a journalist. I’m a panelist on a session called “Who is going to pay for journalism?” and my answer is going to be “frakked if I know”.
As I’ve been saying for five years now, this isn’t about blogging versus journalism. This is about the economic model that old media companies prospered under for the last century being defunct. And it doesn’t matter how much bitching or whining journalists do about it, the fact is, the party is OVER.
Now that doesn’t mean we all don’t want great investigative journalism. As a society, we need it. I just don’t know who is going to pay for it. Of course we all know now that privatized investigative journalism is flawed, as is state-controlled journalism, but they are better than nothing.
As I said on Bronwen’s blog the other day, I don’t remember seeing many Australian journalists going out on strike over the last 20 years as the quality of journalism in this country reached ever-deeper lows. I don’t remember reading too many stories in the AGE or SMH about how tabloidy our news was becoming, either. They just shut up, stuck their heads in the sand, and took the money. They fiddled while Rome burned around them. It’s too late to cry foul now kids.
Meanwhile the Newspaper Association of America just reported that total newspaper advertising revenues fell by $3 billion in the first six months of this year to $18.8 billion, the lowest level in a dozen years.
(Thanks Bron for the link).
