BBC criticised by Murdoch over website plans

Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate on Wednesday accused the British Broadcasting Corp. of using taxpayers' money to build a "digital empire" that would compete with commercial rivals.

The BBC, which receives about 3 billion pounds ($7.19 billion) a year in public funding, has announced plans to relaunch its Web site to incorporate more user-generated content such as blogs and video, as well as developing new broadband portals in areas including sports, music, health and science.

James MacManus, an executive director of Murdoch's News International company, accused the state-funded BBC of "blatantly commercial ambitions" and seeking "to create a digital empire."

"Our view is that can only damage the development of commercial digital media," MacManus said.

"This is being done with public money," he told The Associated Press. "It really is outrageous."

The BBC says it hopes its new site will attract unsigned bands hoping to showcase their music - one of the key successes of MySpace.com, the social networking site recently bought by Murdoch.

"We have one of the best Web sites in the world, but it's rooted in the first digital wave," BBC director-general Mark Thompson told staff on Tuesday. "We need to reinvent it, fill it with dynamic audiovisual content, personalise it, open it up to user-friendly material."

He said in the new world of "BBC Web 2.0," audiences would become "participants and partners."

Rival broadcasters have long complained that the BBC uses public money to fund types of programs supplied by commercial operators, abandoning a public service remit in a chase for viewers.

The BBC currently seeking to renew the license fee - currently 131 pounds a year - that it receives from every television-owning household in Britain. The government is considering the broadcaster's request for increases that would take the fee to 180 pounds by 2013.

MacManus said News International would lobby the government to appoint an independent regulator to oversee the BBC.

How BBC reported this

NZ Prime Minister out of the closet on Peak Oil

Speech by Andrew McNamara M.P. Hervey Bay-ALP on Peak Oil and Australia

Interview with Andrew McNamara - Oil Vulnerability Task Force

As the price of oil hangs at record heights, unmoving, like a pall threatening to choke economies and festering the sore that is inflation (October delivery contracts on the NYMEX are over US$75 a barrel), the cattle-class as well as the impotent media transfixed by daily trivialities and titillations by and large continue to remain clueless as to why we are paying almost NZ$1.80 a litre at the pump.

Economists and "analysts" roll out the usual suspects whenever the price moves skyward, security worries in Nigeria, "weapons of mass destruction" in Iran, or was that Iraq, hurricanes in the gulf. The point today is any minor supply concern that results in a few thousand-barrel production cutback translates into a several dollar bull-run on oil on the mercantile exchange which is never clawed back. To say that "the end of cheap oil" is here is to merely state the bleeding obvious.

Matt Simmons energy investment banker and Peak Oil advocate argued that 2006 would be the year Peak Oil would be absorbed into the public consciousness as much as climate change and it seems he may be right. This week Helen Clark, New Zealand's Prime Minister joined a rapidly growing but exclusive club, the penny has obviously dropped - she openly admitted the real reasons behind high oil prices, "because we're probably not too far short of peak production, if we're not already there" [1].

This watershed statement, which incidentally went over the heads of most of the media turkeys in attendance, has enormous economic and social implications. Firstly it absolves Trevor Mallard (acting Minister of Energy) from having to regurgitate International Energy Agency nonsense that Peak Oil is at least 30 years away. "Not too far short of peak production, if not already there" surely can't mean the same thing as 30 years away. The minister can now base policy in geological reality rather than the flawed economic "business as usual" fantasy that has cheap abundant oil production growing alongside the economy for all eternity.

But will he? Will she?

I can already hear the screams of the damned led by Peter Dunne, all the way down every double-laned highway in the country. By this very admission the Prime Minister puts the Government in a very sticky situation. If indeed we are already at peak oil multi-billion dollar roading projects are about as sensible as New Zealand developing it's own uranium enrichment program. But New Zealand is obsessed with the "growth" dilemma. Economic growth necessarily depends on a cheap energy subsidy, to grow economically one needs to increase energy consumption. As the price of oil continues to creep upwards the spectre of oil-shock induced stagflation looms. The economy is already stagnant. Interest rates are relatively high and inflation is expected to run at over 3% this year. Expect the ride to become somewhat bumpy over the next couple of years.

In light of Prime Minister Helen Clarks peak oil admission the concept of growth must be re-evaluated. Economic growth and oil production exhibit a linear relationship. As we enter the era of oil decline, Jim Kunstler argues the only growth we are likely to see is "growth in our exertions to stay where we are, and the truth is many of the weak will simply fall behind" [2].

If Helen Clark truly comprehends peak oil then momentous changes in public policy must follow, not to mitigate risk in light of such information incurs liability and, is arguably negligent.

The Clark led Government must start immediately with the recognition that we have adopted (and continue to develop at breakneck speeds) a suburban living arrangement for which the outlook is truly bleak. The public can no longer get what the public wants, the required message will not be popular.

Continuing to pump billions into roading projects, ultimately dependant upon the continued stream of cheap Middle Eastern oil after the Prime Ministers admission is moronic. With less oil being produced every year and as the price of petrol moves beyond Himalayan like territory, Transmission Gully (just picking one example), begins to look like a very expensive white elephant - a monument to the exuberant industrial age when there was always more of everything.

[1](2006) PM Talks Palestinian Aid, Health 'N' (Peak) Oil, Tuesday, 18 April 2006, 5:53 pm , Article: Scoop Audio., http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0604/S00206.htm

[2] Kunstler, J. (2006) April 3, Clusterfuck Nation Chronicles: Commentary on the Flux of Events., http://www.kunstler.com

Aussies to get pseudo-ID Card

Govt remains divided over 'smart card' plan - The World Today Transcript

It looks like an ID Card. It smells like an ID Card. Heck, it even spooks you like an ID Card. But, as Australia's carbon copy Commonwealth Prime Minister says, "it ain't no ID card".

AUSTRALIANS will need a photo identity card within four years to receive Medicare and welfare payments but will not be forced to carry it at all times.

The new "smart card" will contain "enhanced security" and replace 17 existing cards for Medicare benefits, family tax, child-care and unemployment payments, pensions, Austudy and pharmaceutical and transport concessions.

People will be able to register for the card from the beginning of 2008 and it will be phased in over two years.

The card will also be used to check identities for immigration and security purposes and to crack down on fraud. Its embedded computer chip will include a photograph, number, signature, date of birth and address.

From 2010 people will not be able to receive government health and welfare payments without a card.

People may choose to have other information stored on the card, such as health and emergency contact details which, for example, ambulance officers could use.

Although it will cost $1 billion it is estimated it will save the Government $3 billion a year.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said the Government had considered a national identity card after last year's London bombings but in the end it "was not predisposed to adopt a national ID card".

He denied the card was "a Trojan horse for an ID card" but acknowledged it would have "enhanced security features".

He said the security features of the smart card were one reason that a separate national identity card was not deemed necessary. Its perceived "Big Brother" features were another reason.

The Government's decision followed a number of cabinet debates. Mr Howard said it showed a balance had been struck between ease of access to government payments and enhanced security measures on the one hand and legitimate concerns about storing personal information on the other.

However some of his ministers think of it as an identity card. Before the announcement the Treasurer, Peter Costello, referred to it as just that, and then corrected himself.

The NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, whom Mr Howard consulted before the announcement, welcomed the card.

He said it was possible to balance threats to security with individual rights.

However, the president of the NSW Council of Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the card would put people at risk of identity theft and fraud.

"Everybody is interested in streamlining accessibility to government services," he said.

"It's really how you go about doing it and ensuring any system is safe and secure and people aren't forced to provide information that is unnecessary and exposes them to the risk of fraud."

The president of the Australian Council of Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, said the announcement "marked a move towards an eventual ID card".

Business reacted suspiciously, saying it could easily turn into an identity card.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry's chief, Peter Hendy, said that although he supported clamping down on welfare fraud he was concerned that "an upgraded card runs the risk of providing government with a platform for a far more costly and intrusive Australia Card-type proposal".

The Opposition's human services spokesman, Kelvin Thomson, gave in-principle support to the card but warned of a potential cost blow-out.

The American politics of morality

It is utterly amazing to hear mouthpieces for the corporate media sound off about 'morality issues' now driving the American political machine.

One wonders: what does morality mean? Does it have anything to do with life and death; with war and peace; with slaughter and genocide? Or does it only have to do with sex?

What would a member of the first peoples, the so-called Indians, say about American morality? A man we now recall by the given name of Powhatan, who was called by his people, Wahunsonacock (1547-1618), who was principal chief of a confederacy of 32 tribes, and who ruled over an area of hundreds of miles, was threatened by Capt. John Smith with destruction.

Chief Powhatan's reply gives us some insight into early American morality:

... Why should you take by force that from us which you can have by love? Why should you destroy us, who have provided you with food? What can you get by war? We can hide our provisions, and fly into the woods and then you must consequently famish by wronging your friends. What is the cause of your jealousy? [From *Great Speeches by Native Americans*, Bob Blaisdell, ed. (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000). p. 4].

Smith owed his very life to Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas, who had saved him from execution a year before he threatened her father. Nor was Wahunsonacock's rap about the white colonists' near starving mere words. Smith himself wrote, in *The General History of Virginia*, "So great was our famine that a savage we slew and buried, the poorer sort took him up again and ate him; And one amongst the rest did kill his wife, powder her and had eaten part of her" [4th Book, p. 294].

How many Americans know that among their 'founding fathers' were cannibals?

Some 200 years later, Americans would force a 'loyal' Indian tribe, the Cherokees, off of their ancestral lands, in what has become known as "The Trail of Tears." A leader of the Cherokees, a war chief known as Junuluska, had fought with Andrew Jackson in the Battle of the Horse Shoe against the Creek. Junuluska brought 500 of his young braves to assist Jackson, and saved Jackson's life when a Creek warrior had him at his mercy. Junuluska's tomahawk literally saved the man who would later become president.

When white colonists in Georgia attacked Cherokee lands, and the U.S. government sought to remove them, Junuluska traveled to Washington, D.C. to plead for his tribe. Jackson received him coldly, telling him, "There is nothing I can do for you."

Within a short time, over 7000 Army troops and volunteers struck Indian country, and men, women, and suckling babes were forced, at bayonet point, into stockades, where they would be imprisoned until the long walk, from Georgia to Oklahoma. Thousands would die, of hunger, sickness, fear, and broken hearts on this "Trail of Tears." Junuluska, seeing the way his people, who were called 'the civilized Indians' because of their Christian faith, their European style of building, and their literacy, were treated by Americans, said, "Oh my God, if I had known at the Battle of the Horse Shoe what I know now, American history would have been differently written" [See Zinn, Howard and Anthony Arnove, *Voices of A People's History of the United States* (NY: Seven Stories, 2004), pp. 144-5].

What do you think they would say about American political morality? What about the long train of coups, and counter-coups waged by the US CIA all over the world? There are more dictators, autocrats, tyrants than I have time to name, who owe their reigns to Washington. They have ravaged their countries, devastated their workers, sold away their souls, for their American masters.

What kind of political morality unleashes psychopaths upon the peoples of the world, in the name of democracy? What kind of political morality seeks to keep the vast majority of the world's people in subjection, in peonage to the Empire?

There is no such thing as political morality; it's an oxymoron, like compassionate conservative, or military intelligence.

Copyright 2004 Mumia Abu-Jamal

To download Mp3's of Mumia's commentaries visit
www.prisonradio.org

SXSW 2006 - South by Southwest Festival

This distinguished music & film conference/festival celebrated it's 20th anniversry last month when it was held from 10/3 to 19/3 in Austin, Texas. Of the two events I would truly love to experience if I ever visit the United States would be the Super Bowl and this. Quite a big decision to make one day....might have to stay for a few months and catch both.

I was really impressed with their website too. They have included a number of BitTorrents with film trailers & an mp3 sample from every artist (over 900 mp3's) that performed. These links are below....enjoy!

SXSW 2006 MP3 Torrent 1

SXSW 2006 MP3 Torrent 2

SXSW 2006 Film Trailer Torrent 1

SXSW 2006 Film Trailer Torrent 2

Australians (more likely Triple J fans) will be interested to note some of the artists who performed there this year including: Something for Kate, Kisschasy, Decoder Ring, Gyroscope, End of Fashion, The Living End and Missy Higgins to name but a few.

Tide turns on Dubya's wreck

SYDNEY, NSW, is a long way from Washington DC but, even at this distance, it is clear that the Bush Administration is falling to pieces.

In recent weeks, scanning the political coverage in the mainstream US media and sampling the blogs has been to watch a flood tide ebbing to reveal a rotting, skeletal hulk. It is the George W. Bush ship of fools, stuck in the mud for the world to see in all its mendacity, its incompetence, its faith-based stupidity.

It is possible, at this late stage, that even Bush himself has begun to realise something is wrong. That oddly simian face is ashen, the eyes leaden. The voice is shrill and its tone defensive.

"I'm the decider and I decide what's best," he squawked to reporters in the White House rose garden the other day, as the screws turned tighter on his disastrous Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Can you imagine Roosevelt, Eisenhower or Kennedy blurting something like that?

Rummy is looking knackered too, with six retired generals going public to agree that he is "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically", to quote one of them.

These men would have been junior officers in Vietnam, veterans of the all-American nightmare they now see replicated in Iraq. They don't want the mad old warmonger doing it over again in Iran. As former Marine Corps Lieutenant-General Gregory Newbold wrote in Time magazine: "? we must never again stand by quietly while those ignorant of and casual about war lead us into another one and then mismanage the conduct of it".

But the Middle East quicksands are not all that is killing Bush's presidency. Domestically, the rot is wide and deep. It is a budget deficit blowing out towards $US700 billion this financial year as Dubya juggles to fund his war while stealing from the American and immigrant poor to bestow tax cuts on the rich.

It is criminal sleaze in Washington, with the Republicans' favourite influence peddler, Jack Abramoff, headed for jail, and one of Bush's closest Texan buddies, the disgraced House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, not far behind him.

It is arrogant, Nixonian trampling of the law to order the wiretapping of American citizens and the leaking of national security secrets. It is the rape of the environment to enrich big business, especially big oil. And resonating with ordinary Americans most of all, it is the loss of the city of New Orleans - not by Hurricane Katrina but by the bottomless incompetence of the feds' post-apocalypse response.

This is a trash presidency, founded on lies and knavery, fraud and ignorant ideological crackpottery.

KARL ROVE is another faux-Texan wheeler-dealer sometimes described as Bush's brain, a courtier most often seen superglued to the presidential right ear. Pink and pudgy, he looks like one of Disney's three little pigs, although infinitely more smug.

Rove was shunted sideways this week in a shuffle of the White House deck chairs which also saw Dubya's press secretary lose his job. His new assignment will be to divert the Republican Party from the coming train wreck of the Congressional mid-term elections this November.

That will be crucial to the survival of this gang. If the Democrats regain control of Congress, there would be a good chance of them moving to impeach Bush for high crimes and misdemeanours.

The famous Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein raised just that possibility in a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine. "We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale," he wrote.

Exactly. Compared to this lot, Bill Clinton was John the Baptist.

THE next question is this: what will the Howard Government do when Bush and co decide to bomb Iran?

On past performance, Australia will be the kiddie on the sideline, panting to join the team: "Pick me, pick me." That, of course, is how we wangled our way into Iraq.

To quote the admirable US Marine Lieutenant-General Newbold again: "My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results."

As we have seen, John Howard and Lord Downer are terrific at casual swagger, although neither has ever heard a bullet go pffwt-pzzz through the rubber trees. Luckily, they have not had results to bury. But next time we might not be so easily conned. After the never-ever GST, children overboard, Iraq, WorkChoices, AWB and now Papua, Howard has lost public trust. The moment we hear him blather that no decision has been made for war, that everyone is working for a peaceful solution to the Iran crisis - that's when we know the SAS is already there.

When the shoulders go back, the chin goes up and the lower lip juts out, you know the Prime Minister is lying.