Sign A Petition Please

Sign this petition (please)

Sam Seder (link to show/blog) is many things, a comedian, a writer, actor, director and talk radio giant. Well he would be if the stream of incompetents that run Air America Radio would give him back his daily 5 days a week radio show. He is always well informed and funny in a unique way-

Talking about his film A Bad Situationist– We shot it in May of 2001. It is about the muting of dissent. I was very angry about the election. I still feel it was a far more damaging event to the long-term health of the US than the attacks of 9/11.

Anyway, the film is about Joe Lieberman’s fuck up of a son, who is installed in a NYC co-op by his father with the hopes that he’ll shut up about the Supreme Court and get a job. He ends up reading the back of a situationist international book and starting an intellectual salon. There some radical orthodox Jewish postal workers try and convince him to commit a terrorist attack.

The movie ends with the guy on the roof of his New York apartment aiming a bazooka at another building. We were in week 8 of editing when the planes hit the towers. The finishing fund company pulled out and I had no cash to finish the movie.

He is unafraid to talk about socialism (occasionally) or to allow rightists enough rope on air to hang themselves, he is not a corporate shill, he talks about Palestine, his wife made a documentary REVOLUC!ON about brilliant Cuban photographers that he co-produced all in spite of the US sanctions on Cuba. He is a voice of principled & amused dissent in the belly of the Empire. And he needs the suits to be persuaded to give him back his 5 day a week show, so if you want me to be able to podcast him 5 days a week sign this petition (and you know you want to, after all my podcasting habit is the most important thing in the world evah!).

Virgin Begins Assault on Net Neutrality

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett has attacked the principle of net neutrality, whereby internet service providers do not interfere with or degrade the speed at which content is delivered from websites to consumers, branding it as “bollocks”.

Berkett’s cable operator ranks as the second largest internet service provider in the UK with approximately 3.6m customers.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, Berkett said that “this net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks”, and revealed that Virgin is already in talks with unnamed content providers about paying to have their content delivered faster than others.

Feeding into the debate between internet service providers and the BBC over iPlayer, Berkett even warned that public service broadcasters who choose not to pay for faster access to Virgin’s subscriber base would end up in “bus lanes”, effectively having their content delivered to consumers at a lower speed.

Thus far, Ofcom has made little comment on the network neutrality debate. In 2007, long before the current iPlayer discussions, the then Ofcom policy chief Douglas Scott indicated that the regulator planned a “hands off” approach to the issue. Scott has since departed the regulator for Channel 4.

[nb. in original article ‘bollocks’ was censored, I however filled in the full word as I hate censorship like a motherfucking cunt].

Note how a regulator has joined a corporation directly involved in the sector he was paid to regulate on the public behalf, the corporatocracy abide! Also via the same Boing Boing post that alerted me to this some history of what Virgin media really is (although I hold no affection for Branson, a public school elite egomaniac -if you think he is a friendly beardy man of the people, then go see Marie Antoinette, I hear she has some cake for you- so you can stick the brand up your arse)-

Charlie’s Diary: Around 1997, the UK installed a cable TV and cable internet infrastructure. Digging up hundreds of thousands of streets is expensive, so two limited-term regional monopolies were granted to cable operators, NTL and Telewest. After a while they began rolling out broadband internet on their networks (around 2000, if memory serves), and underwent the harsh learning curve associated with becoming an ISP. Then something obvious happened. In 2006, the two loss-making cablecos merged to form one mammoth blundering mess, NTL/Telewest. And also in 2006, the new hybrid purchased Branson’s Virgin Mobile brand (then a cellphone franchise) and began the process of rebranding, from February 2007, as Virgin Media.

So tediously here we go for the UK, corporations want to turn this into a class/capital stratified web. The people most responsible for the internet are steadfastly against this and enthusiastically back net neutrality, only money grubbing suits want to wreck this and turn it into a McInternet. At a time when corporate dominance in the world is starting to be challenged as people awake to the hateful ideology behind it for the internet to fall to them would be terrible.

A friend of mine used to rent a flat in central London that overlooked what was then the ITC’s offices (they were absorbed into Ofcom a few years ago, 03). We could see in quite easily and observed that the senior management were rarely there and enjoyed lunch breaks of an average 3 hours, a lot of the rest of the staff also enjoyed very flexible lunches. We concluded it must be a great job and maybe a lot of the people they regulate were anxious to be friendly with them and invited them to long lunches, who knows? Anyway Ofcom taking a hands off approach is tantamount to doing the corporations jobs of destroying Net Neutrality. We must insist on legislation enshrining the NetNeutral principle in law before they surreptitiously do away with it. What this ultimately shows is how crucial infrastructure should be publicly owned in a democratic context and responsive to the citizen’s, paid for by just and redistributive taxes on …corporations. That would require a government of, by and for the people, not the corporate incest we have now.  Oh well you can dream.

Shut It Monobrow

Not only is Noel Gallagher one of the least original rock musicians…ever. He’s a big idiot, and if people are not buying Glastonbury tickets because of Jay Z they are big idiots too. It’s a big festival and the variety and mixing it up are one of the things that makes it worthwhile. I now need one of those waving shimmery visual wipes & a harp sting as I remember the Reading festival in…erm 1992. Nirvana’s last UK appearance (I almost feel bad about recommending Kurt take up skeet shooting- buy your own shotgun, you’ll love it, it’ll cheer you up! and -Hey you’re right, this heroin stuff is really moreish. In my defence I did point out his missus was a fucking fame vampire) the other big headliners were The Wonderstuff & Public Enemy and it was fucking great.

“tradition of guitar music” Gallagher? Oh fuck off, just because drum machines(although of all the bands who could get away with a basic 4/4 drum machine beat…ahem), samplers, decks, sequencers and innovation confuse and scare you, like giving a monkey an iPhone. When you worked with the Chemical Brothers did they stage dress the studio with vacuum tubes, Beatles posters and Marshall amps, hiding all the computers so you didn’t get spooked and be afeared they were wizards dabbling in the Devil’s work? Somehow I seem to recall some of the most legendary sets at Glastonbury being done by dance bands, y’know, with no guitars! You’re a dullard and the least impressive musician to emerge from Manchester ever! Neil Innes wrote one of your best songs! And while ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ is etched upon my cultural map it is in the context of ‘Our Friends in the North’ as Geordie walks over the Tyne bridge and away from his long lost friends. And let’s face facts, everything after the second album were faded photocopies, you only had about 20 good songs in you, and most of them had been written years before by The Beatles.

Italy Dammit!

The thing about having a billionaire running your country is- his interests coincide with only about 500 other people, for the millions of other Italians, you screwed baby!

Vampire Just Wants To Help

Is it too cynical to say the World bank is playing up the food crisis (which is not really a crisis just inflation brought on by globalised capital, there’s enough food, except it costs more, guess who that benefits, it rhymes with lorporayshuns) to open up new markets for loans?

Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, told the gathering: “Based on a very rough analysis, we estimate that doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty.”

The bankers appealed for $500 million in donations by May 1 to re-stock the UN’s depleted World Food Programme. They have also called on on the oil-exporting countries to invest more of their windfall earnings in Africa.

Shifting just one per cent of the assets held by those countries’ sovereign investment funds could draw $30bn into African development.

The World Bank said there are plans to nearly double its lending for agriculture in Africa to $800m.

“[We] are facing a huge problem and it is a problem for the World Bank, the IMF and you shouldn’t be surprised that we are going to devote a lot of time to this problem,” Strauss-Kahn said.

So the twin demons of neoliberalism are throwing on the concern troll mantle at a time when their market has dried up as countries got wise to their ways (the IMF flogging off its gold to keep revenues flowing). The practical realities are food is getting more expensive, (I just went shopping for the first time in ten days and I paid attention to prices and almost everything was significantly costlier, I would reckon on a rough guesstimate by around-ish 5-7% since the end of last year) the solutions they offer do not alter that, they just stop as many people dying due to the system they support. It’s treating a symptom to actually enable the disease to thrive. It’s a vampire worrying about people bleeding to death. The problem is people really need to eat (I’m not blinding you with science am I?) so the immediacy doesn’t allow for altering the institutions  that would deliver life saving interventions, but longer term the World Bank and the IMF need to be consigned to history, as does the fundamentalist market worship they inflict.

Q2N Back Channel Talks Progress

Iran and the United States have been engaged in secret “back channel” discussions for the past five years on Iran’s nuclear programme and the broader relationship between the two sworn enemies, The Independent can reveal.

One of the participants, former senior US diplomat Thomas Pickering, explained that a group of former American diplomats and experts had been meeting with Iranian academics and policy advisers “in a lot of different places, although not in the US or Iran”.

“Some of the Iranians were connected to official institutions inside Iran,” he said in a telephone interview from Washington. The group was organised by the UN Association of the USA, a pro-UN organisation. Its work was facilitated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a government-funded think-tank chaired by the former chief UN weapons inspector for Iraq, Rolf Ekeus.

The revelation about the existence of an Iran-US back channel coincides with the recent publication by three of its American members, including Mr Pickering, of proposals aimed at overcoming the deadlock between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The initiative addresses the crunch issue of Iran’s right to enrich uranium on its own soil while providing guarantees that the nuclear fuel will not be diverted for military purposes.

Mr Pickering spoke of a “rather positive” reaction to the plan, which provides for an international consortium to jointly manage and run uranium enrichment on Iranian soil.

However, the Bush administration has not responded, and remains wedded to its current policy of sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to halt uranium enrichment in line with UN demands, while offering the opportunity to enrich uranium outside the country through a Russian consortium. A Foreign Office spokesman said Britain was “aware” of the proposals but did not have an official response. The Iranian government, according to Mr Pickering, has let it be known that “they would not respond unless it was offered officially”

So will diplomacy be allowed to work or like before will it be sabotaged and rejected in favour of an attack and a false history (fair & balanced…) claiming they did their best to avoid conflict. They have so far gotten away with it (Blair while having left office is a world player for the same forces and a multi millionaire now), as long as that impunity remains an attack is a viable policy for them.