by cameron | Apr 22, 2009 | Culture Jamming, Melbourne, Podcast
Every now and again I get to chat with someone who has been an inspiration to me for many years – Noam Chomsky, Ray Kurzweil, Doc Searls, Leo Sayer, John Romero, Vint Cerf – and this is another of those episodes.
Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy. He is the CEO of the Blackspot Anticorporation. For 20 years, Kalle has been trying to buy space on TV networks around the world to show Adbusters’ anti-consumerism commercials such as these:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQbW31Fa4SM&list=PLLWWwP1Ombs3_EB0kIm6KdmVrsbAS4anA&index=1]
He is continually rejected by the networks who refuse to take his money and show his ads on the ground that it will offend their larger advertisers. So Kalle has been fighting them in the courts to try to get equal access to the airwaves and, after 20 years of the cases being dismissed by the courts, he’s finally had a win. He joined me recently to talk about it.
Follow Adbusters on Twitter!
Adbusters are the folks behind “Buy Nothing Day”. I shot some video of folks promoting BND in Melbourne back in 2006:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8kHXrcG1E4&hl=en&fs=1]
by cameron | Apr 11, 2009 | activism, Culture Jamming
|
“This is a great day for Adbusters,” says Kalle Lasn, editor and co-founder of the magazine. “After 20 years of legal struggle, the courts have finally given us permission to take on the media corporations and hold them up to public scrutiny.”
|
|
|
I’m a big fan of Kalle Lasn, editor and co-founder of Adbusters Magazine and author of the book Culture Jam. For 20 years, he’s been prevented from buying ads in newspapers, magazines and TV. They refuse to take his money! Why? It might have something to do with the content of his ads, which tend to say things “Consume Less”. Lasn believes the Canadian Charter grants EVERY Canadian citizen the right to access the public airwaves, so anyone should be able to buy ads under the same rules and conditions. So Adbusters has been trying to use the legal system to force the TV stations to play ball and in a recent ruling, the British Columbia Court of Appeal has overturned a previous BC Supreme Court ruling which means Adbusters can now take their case against the big media companies to the BC Supreme Court.
Read more.
by cameron | Mar 23, 2009 | activism, US politics, Wikileaks
Watch this video from Australian journalist John Pilger if you’re at all interested in where our modern “news” organisations came from, why they can’t be trusted, and how they support the agenda of the elite, both Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Labor. This is one of the most inspiring speeches I have heard in a long, long time.
by cameron | Feb 19, 2009 | activism, climate change, environment, Podcast
My guest today is Mara Bun, CEO of Green Cross Australia. According to their site:
Green Cross Australia is a new national NGO that works on the frontline of climate change: the human dimension. We anticipate and resolve conflicts over natural resources that put our environment at risk, and we foster sustainable partnerships between business, government and the community. We prepare communities for environmental impacts in Australia and overseas. This ranges from the impact of fires, floods and environmental disasters on Australian cities to the mass displacement of populations due to rising sea levels.
Pretty topical, with the floods in QLD and the fires in VIC. Mara talks about her background (which is an interesting story) and the vision of Green Cross.
PLEASE SUPPORT THE TPN PLEDGE!
by cameron | Oct 29, 2008 | activism, Atheism, US politics
Today is my 2nd last day in Seattle. I’ve had an awesome time. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime. There’s a few podcasts I’ve shot while I’m here that I’ll get out asap. In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a couple of thoughts about fund raising.
Obviously the USA is crazy about their Presidential elections at the moment and most, if not all, of the people I’ve met in Seattle are rooting for Obama. When I ask them who is funding Obama they tell me the same thing – he’s raised his money over the Internet from ordinary Americans!! It’s amazing!! The triumph of the little people over the politics!!
When I ask them how they know this to be true, they give me a strange look at tell me OBAMA SAYS IT’S TRUE! Oh well, of course.
My next question is usually “so how much did you give him?” and they usually answer “ummm nothing”. So who are these people who are funding Obama?
According to Kenneth Timmerman, who writes for the ultra-right-wing site Newsmax, Obama doesn’t need to disclose the names of people who donate less than $200.
Timmerman writes:
Campaigns are not required to disclose contributors who donate less than $200 — and Obama’s campaign refuses to release their names, addresses, and donation amounts. Obama has collected a staggering $603.2 million. Most of the money — $543.3 million — has come from individual contributors, half of it from “small†donors Obama won’t disclose.
So who are these people? How do we know that they aren’t big corporations – or non-US governments – who are making millions of small donations via credit cards over the internet?
Timmerman claims there is some strangeness about Obama’s donations. since Oct 14, the following people have donated:
OJ Simpson
Daffy Duck
Bart Simpson
Family Guy
King Kong
and
jkbkj Hbkjb
Timmerman’s source claims he made donations using several of these names and a disposable credit card. If Obama’s team aren’t picking up and rejecting fake names to ensure that 1) the person is real and 2) the person hasn’t donated more than the maximum amount of $2,300, then the system is open to fraud and manipulation.
Yet most Americans I talk to believe the Hollywood answer, that Obama is getting his funding from millions of small donations from believers.
Don’t get me wrong – I hope they are right and I am wrong. I hope I’m just being cynical. But there are questions here which the Obama campaign should be forced to answer.
The other great fund raising story I’ve heard lately is The Atheist Bus Campaign which launched Tuesday October 21 2008 in the UK. They hoped to raise £5,500 to run 30 buses across London for four weeks with the slogan: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” They overshot their goal. They have currently raised over £111,000!
For some months now I’ve been planning to move TPN over to a donation-based system. We’ll be asking out audience to contribute some funds to help cover our running costs. Wouldn’t you rather have media that doesn’t rely on corporate sponsorship or government funding? I guess we’ll see over the next few months how much people value TPN’s content.
by cameron | Aug 13, 2008 | activism, Culture Jamming, Iraq
From the Center for Media and Democracy:
Today, we struck a blow against propaganda, and for transparency and accountability.
In early 2002, the Pentagon began cultivating retired military officers who frequently serve as media commentators to help make the case for invading Iraq. The pundit program continued — promoting the Bush administration’s stance on the Guantanamo Bay detention center, warrantless wiretapping and other controversial issues — until New York Times reporter David Barstow exposed its existence in April 2008.
Thanks to Blake Hall of our IT staff and senior researcher Diane Farsetta, now you and anyone with web access can search the massive cache of military documents detailing the Pentagon’s illegal attempts to shape U.S. public opinion. The New York Times first obtained the documents. After the Times reported on the covert pundit program, the Pentagon posted the documents online in a desperate attempt at damage control. But the documents weren’t text searchable, making systematic analysis of this important information nearly impossible.
But we’ve now cracked the Pentagon’s code and made the 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents fully text searchable, posting them all on our SourceWatch website, for journalists, researchers and concerned citizens.
What’s great about this is that it is a further demonstration that the media has been compromised. We all need to understand that EVERY time we see a so-called “expert commentator” on mainstream media, the chances are they are a front for one organisation or another and CANNOT BE TRUSTED as an impartial source. This, by the way, goes for leftist commentators as well as those from the right. The system is played the same way by both camps. Our initial position on anything you see on the news or any current affairs show is “TRUST NO1” unless you are really sure of their credentials as an independent commentator.
