What the blogosphere is saying this month about the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the Australian Internet

First up, ACMA is already using its soon-to-be executive muscle to bully Australian-hosted websites into not linking to sites on its 'blacklist'. One of the sites disbarred — among many others — is a perfectly legitimate anti-abortion site that at worst could be described as 'cheesy'. ACMA's bullying is on the pricy side, too — AUD$11,000 a pop. The blacklist (as you would expect) has been leaked, while Conroy himself is now planning to 'monitor blogs'. Quite apart from the egregiousness of this exercise in censorship, it is important to realise that Ruddy is trying to bypass parliament with this stuff, so that they don't have to deal with that pesky Senate (Xenophon and the Greens as well as the Opposition in this case). Government by executive order, anyone? Skepticlawyer 23 March 2009

Is Conroy a fundy? Will this site be on his list 'cause we all know that you can't be good without religion. *Palm/Head*
You don't have to look online for sexual predators, look no further than your local church. Atheist Nexus 21 March 2009

Stephen Conroy is a Cnut 21 March 2009

STEVE CONROY BELONGS ON THE BACK BENCH AND FAILING BEING ABLE TO GET THAT RIGHT, MAY POSSIBLY FIND PURPOSE AND MEANING AS A DOOR STOP. Thinkers Podium 23 March 2009

It was only a matter of time, but it's finally happened. The DBCDE has alienated enough of its private sector partners that one of them has leaked the blacklist. Websinthe 19 March 2009

Apparently, Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is wetting his bed over the thought that his fellow Australians might think somewhat less of him for so enthusiastically promoting the idea of an Internet filter. Kerplunk 23 March 2009

Guys, we're in trouble.
My assistant was reading the internet to me this morning, and do you know what she said? She said that the average punter doesn't think the filter is going to work. We're spending a couple of hundred million dollars on this thing! If John and Jane Easy-to-Scare think we're wasting money in the middle of the GFC, we're f##ked, okay? F##ked.
We've got to get these shmucks back on-side.
Leaking the list was a good start. Lots of scary-sounding websites, "violent"-this, and "rape"-that, and whoever came up with the dentist? Genius. That is the kind of attention-to-detail that makes me proud to be part of this shadowy conspiracy. People are scared of the dentist; visits are painful and expensive and wasn't someone raped at a dentist once? Why, it's almost as if "false-positives" in the list are a good thing! Nicely done.
In 1960, I bet if you told an American that men would walk on the moon, they'd have said you were crazy, then robbed you at gunpoint. But as soon as the Americans faked that moon landing, all those doubting pieholes became true believers.
I want you guys to find out what can we learn from the American experience, and how we might apply those learnings to the trial. I want it on my desk by the end of the day.
Look, we're doing good work. The Lord's work. We can't allow these Mountain Dew-sucking deviants to keep running circles around us. Get your shit together, get me some answers, then get me a latte and a mini-muffin.
Lots of love,
Fake Stephen Conroy Department of the Internets 20 March 2009 [apologies to the fake Stephen Conroy but obscenities are masked because existing voluntary filters being used by some ISPs make North Coast Voices emailing posts option difficult to use successfully otherwise]

Here's a summary of the views of many in the real and virtual world. Senior nanny Conroy is a dipstick, an unresponsive loon, an ill-mannered and unpleasant smear tactician, an intellectual thuggee, and a morally derelict moralist dedicated to calling opponents of his oppressive, inept, useless and futile proposed filtering regime supporters of paedophilia.

Never has one man so singlehandedly struggled to institute a policy reviled by so many without actually listening to anything anyone was telling him, for reasons that have to remain inexplicable and mysterious, even when far-fetched notions that he belongs to Opus Dei or just wants to suck up to Steve Fielding are trotted out.

He's no more capable of sophisticated policy analysis of the new world of the intertubes, new media and new digital content than a Balmain member of the Labor party armed with a hammer and a baseball bat. If it's a nail, bash it with the baseball bat. If it's the intertubes, hit it with the hammer. The Michael Duffy Files 23 March 2009

Senator Conroy has a lot to answer for. Between trying to destroy filter the internet and keeping the whole NBN process clouded in secrecy (so nobody can criticise his handling of it, we suppose), there are a lot of arguments and issues that the Minister needs to answer for. And considering he's going to be a guest on the ABC's Q&A program next Thursday, this could be our chance to ask him the tough questions.

So, this is a call to arms. All of you Gizmodians who are interested in asking why Senator Conroy has so badly mishandled everything he's touched so far should head over to the Q&A website and ask their questions. Melbourne readers should also try and get into the audience for the show. And everyone make sure you watch Q&A next Thursday to watch just how Conroy responds to the difficult questions. Gizmodo 20 March 2009

...Conroy's filter proposal represents the greatest assault on free speech and an open society in the country's history. By its very nature, it is categorical and self-concealing, far beyond the sleazy and capricious "sedition" laws of the Howard government. For the left and the libertarian right it has to be recognised not only as an utter priority, but as the point on which a political realignment occurs. Crikey 19 March 2009

It is disappointing that the Communications Minister's department, and the Age, are so ignorant that they think Whirlpool is a blog. Whirlpool discussion forum 22 March 2009

It's almost MadiGrass time. Come on down, Barack!

One of the oldest annual peaceful protests in Australia takes place on the NSW North Coast every year.
Yep, it's almost MadiGrass time again at Nimbin.
Time for all those old counter-culture warriors to dust off their good duds and march 'n' party for an end to Aussie prohibition of Teh Weed.

This year's poster fair cracked me up.

It's a good bet that U.S. President Barack Obama never thought he would feature at this rally.

Web Control by Professor Julien Petley, Brunel University

Attempts to rid the Internet of pornographic material are beginning to have a wider impact on freedom of expression online writes Julien Petley in the Spring 2009 article Web Control posted at Index on Censorship.**

** Due to the Rudd Government's recent entry into the strange world of Internet censorship I do not feel comfortable placing a direct link to the article, as linking directly to this academic critique would see North Coast Voices possibly risk overt bullying by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Update: Somebody Think of the Children reports that the residence of the owner of domain name Wikileaks has been raided.

"Neo-Liberal Meltdown": the global financial crisis explained

Robert Mann writing in the March 2009 issue of The Monthly magazine explains the beginnings of the global financial crisis, for those of us who don't have an economics degree or work in the financial sector.
He makes a better fist of it than the Prime Minister in his previous essay in the same magazine.

The causes of the global financial crisis are already reasonably clear. The crisis originated in a series of interconnected developments within the American financial sector. From the 1980s a vast market in obscure and opaque financial instruments known as derivatives developed there. The market grew at an accelerating pace. In 1989 it was worth US$2 trillion; by 2002, $100 trillion; and by September 2008, almost $600 trillion. (The annual GDP of the United States is presently about $15 trillion.) This explosion of the market in derivatives depended, in turn, on ideological convictions and political acts. In 1998 Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, argued for the regulation of this market. Without it, she argued, the American economy and the global economy were being placed at risk. She was overpowered by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, and President Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin. Shortly after, Congress withdrew from the CFTC the authority to regulate derivatives. At much the same time, as a consequence of a $300-million lobbying campaign by financial corporations, Congress also repealed President Roosevelt's 1933 Glass-Steagall Act. Its purpose had been to separate the commercial banks, which had become involved in the speculative frenzy of the '20s, from the activities of the investment banks. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act opened all the American major banks to massive involvement in the derivatives market. More deeply, as Joseph Stiglitz has argued in Vanity Fair, the repeal completed the transformation of American banking culture.

The post-2000 derivatives explosion was also aided by American monetary policy. Greenspan reacted to the bursting of the dotcom bubble by steadily lowering official interest rates. In 2000-01 they dropped rapidly from 6.5% to 3.5%. By 2003 they had reached 1%. Effectively, at least for bankers, as Charles Morris puts it in his book The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown, money was now free. At this time the explosion in the derivatives market intersected with the explosion in another market, sub-prime mortgage lending, which rose from US$145 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005. On the basis of a housing bubble, which increased the price of houses by an annual 7-8%, borrowers with low incomes and no assets were encouraged by banks and mortgage brokers to purchase houses worth several hundred thousand dollars. Derivative traders saw these sub-prime mortgages as a splendid opportunity. They bundled up the mortgages and created from them esoteric derivatives products - like collateralised mortgage obligations or collateralised debt obligations - which were then sold on in their trillions to investors and pension funds. In an article for Portfolio, Michael Lewis gives a telling example of how the racket worked. Big Wall Street firms took piles of sub-prime mortgages with a BBB rating. They bundled them into new products and divided these products into tranches. The top 60% of these tranches were rated AAA. Lewis's informant, Steve Eisman, who made his fortune by 'shorting' the corporations and the products involved in this trade (that is, gambling on their failure), kept asking himself: How is this possible; why is this allowed?......

The systematically phoney evaluations of the derivative products and the corporations which dealt in them, pocketing substantial fees with each contract, arose as a result of a straightforward but fatal ratings-agency conflict of interest. The profits of the agencies derived from the Wall Street banks and investment businesses they were supposed to rate. The continuation of their own very healthy profit growth relied on their willingness to turn a blind eye. Yet the fraudulent behaviour of Wall Street rested on another, even deeper, kind of blindness: the ideological blindness of the regulators. Most important here was the regulator-in-chief, Alan Greenspan, the most enthusiastic derivatives cheerleader, who believed with regard to derivatives (and everything else) that the invisible hand of the market was an infinitely more reliable and intelligent guide than any regulatory action by the state........

It is obvious whose interest all this served. Before the recent crash, the average taxable income of the top 15,000 American income earners was US$30 million; their annual income in total, US$441 billion. In the mid 1970s the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned approximately 20% of national assets. On the eve of the financial collapse they owned some 40%. Very many of these people derived their income and their wealth from the financial sector. In 2008, even after the sector had begun imploding, the executives of the Wall Street corporations that were eventually rescued by taxpayers rewarded themselves with US$18 billion in bonuses. Vast riches had apparently come to be seen by this predatory class as an entitlement.

The full essay here.

How much the Australian Government has borrowed because of the global financail crisis to date is here.

'Truffles' Turnbull is peeved

According to Granny Herald the Leader of the Opposition was a mite peeved last Sunday:
''The application fee for a loan from Rudd Bank will be a donation to the Labor Party, we all know that,'' said Malcolm as a precursor to his favourite line of the week about a canine returning to its chunder.''Whenever Labor governments decide to get into the business of banking or financing the private sector, it's invariably tied up with cronyism, it's tied up with political donations.''........
''Look, this is a very bad idea. It's - leaving aside the question of competence and corruption and all of that which invariably goes with incompetence and corruption, invariably goes hand in hand with Labor banking - the big problem here Barrie, the other big problem is that it will make the perceived problem worse because the minute you have Mr Dumb Money himself, Kevin Rudd, there with a big bag of taxpayers' money, ready to lend on, take on bad loans or dud loans in order, for political reasons, any member of a syndicate that wants to get out will kick up a fuss knowing that the Government will take them out...''

Which is all a bit rich coming from a man who spent tens of thousands of dollars paving his way to Liberal Party pre-selection and then election to federal parliament and only recently had a merchant bank pay to bail him out of protracted litigation.

Whatisname and I had a meeting of minds

It was an almost comic situation.
In full camera glare Kevin Rudd watched political triumph threaten to turn to smoke on the breeze, as President Obama first forgot his title and then had obvious difficulty recalling Our Kev's name in the middle of one photo opportunity for the gathered media during the Australian Prime Minister's visit to Washington this week.

Yamba named best town in Australia in March 2009

The Australian Traveller Magazine has just named Yamba, at the mouth of the Clarence River on the New South Wales North Coast, the best little town in Australia.

It heads the list of 100 towns voted on by the judging panel, when asked the question:

"Regardless of where the town is located, would you recommend a good friend drive an hour out of their way specifically to visit this town?"

Pictures found at The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Examiner and Google Images