by cameron | Aug 8, 2008 | activism, Australian media, Australian politics
I did a show yesterday on China’s censorship and human rights record. A few people have told me that in Australia, we can say what we like and do what we like. Really?
Why is KRUDD spending $60 million on Internet censorship?
Why did a Gold Coast teenager get arrested and charged for wearing a “blasphemous†t-shirt?
Why was Haneef held without charge for 12 days?
Why was Dr Phillip Nitschke’s book on assisted suicide banned?
Why were two Islamic books banned?
China has censorship. Australia has censorship. Ours may be less strict and more sophisticated, but if you want to argue against the principle of censorship, let’s fight it at home first. I’ll be there with you. Let’s just avoid the mass hysteria and hypocrisy of criticizing easy targets when we have similar laws at home. That’s just the way the mass media and governments deflect attention from what is happening in our own backyards.
Australia has laws about what and can’t be said. So does China. And China isn’t going to change until the people of China was it to and do something about it en masse.
If Australia REALLY wants to protest China’s human rights record, let’s boycott the Olympics. We could also stop selling them coal but I suspect economic sanctions hurt innocent civilians more than the people in power. However let’s stop censorship at home first, then perhaps we’ll be in a position to critique other countries.
by cameron | Aug 7, 2008 | Podcast
On today’s show I’m joined by Sophie Peer, China Campaign Co-ordinator for Amnesty International, Fi Bendall from the Bendall Group, and Ben Barren, social media baron, to discuss the online campaign Amnesty have run over the last 3 weeks to raise awareness of China’s human rights record. The campaign asked Australian bloggers to unite and support their Chinese counterparts who have been banned, blocked, denied and imprisoned by the Chinese government for using the Internet to express their right to freedom of speech. The destination site for the campaign was UNCENSOR.com.au. The other site they recommend on the show is Stilgherrian’s blog.
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by cameron | Jun 26, 2008 | Australian politics, Iraq
America – your tax dollars have been well spent. What can you buy with one trillion dollars? No-bid contracts:
Nearly Four Decades Later, U.S. Oil Companies Return to Iraq
Four oil companies are in the final stage of contract negotiations to regain drilling rights in Iraq — thirty-six years after they lost them. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — founding partners in the Iraq Petroleum Company — are currently in talks with Iraq’s Oil Ministry “for no-bid contracts to service Iraq’s largest fields.” Joining them are Chevron and several smaller oil companies. The deal is expected to be approved by the end of the month and “will lay the foundation for the first commercial work for the major companies in Iraq since the American invasion, and open a new and potentially lucrative country for their operations.” The no-bid process has frozen out 40 other oil companies, including Indian, Russian and Chinese competitors. A spokesperson for the Oil Ministry said that “the no-bid contracts were a stop-gap measure to bring modern skills into the fields while the oil law was pending in Parliament.” He added that the companies chosen already had a relationship with the government, “advising the ministry without charge for two years before being awarded the contracts.” While the current contracts are relatively small, they represent a foot in the door for much more lucrative future deals.
Source: New York Times, June 19, 2008 via Center for Media and Democracy
by cameron | Jun 26, 2008 | Uncategorized
Most of the coverage you’ll see about the passing of Carlin this week – that is, assuming you see any at all, I don’t think I’ve seen a single mention on Australian TV – will cover his infamous “Seven Words” sketch and how it helped to break down free speech barriers. Tell that to the poor Gold Coast kid who was charged today for wearing a t-shirt which said “Jesus Is A Cunt”.
My favourite Carlin rant, one I’ve listened to many, many times, goes a little something like this:
“The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying – lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.”
In one of his last interviews, he said:
“There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species–and my culture in America specifically–have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power.”
And that pretty sums up how I feel. Humans had a lot of potential and we fucked it all up on mythology and superstition and greed and violence. And if we don’t sort our shit out in the next 30 years, the machines are going to wake up, take one look at us and say “sorry, you are the Weakest Link” and evict us from the big house.
by cameron | Jun 24, 2008 | Australian media
Tony Harris sent me a link to this story in the New York Times which says that this year is shaping up to be the worst on record for newspaper advertising revenue.
I’ve been predicting a steady decline in advertising revenue for years (The Future Of Newspapers, State of the News Print Media in Australia 2007, Aussie Newspapers in decline and denial ) as people move online to get their news. The newspapers report people are moving online to their sites, but unfortunately they don’t make as much money from online advertising as they do from print, because online they have competition.
So what happens when revenue is in decline? They have to sack people and stop investing. The rot sets in.
A couple of the big metro newspapers in Australia seem to be holding steady but I suspect that’s got more to do with funny statistics more than anything substantial in the trending. They will inevitably fall prey to the same forces bringing down the newspapers in the US.
This is a good example of where shareholder activism (as Stephen Mayne was talking about on the show last week) is needed. Why aren’t the shareholders of Fairfax and News creating more of a shitstorm about what those companies are doing to make sure they don’t go down the tubes over the next decade? All I ever heard from Fairfax’s management is “things are great, we’ll be around forever” which just shows me that they are either in denial or just lying their asses off, hoping they’ll get out before the whole facade crumbles around them.
