In Will the next GFC turn out Vic lights? Andrew Herington at Climate Spectator highlights the risk of stranded assets amongst the coal-fired power generator companies in Victoria:

In 2010 it was reported that the Latrobe Valley generators had a combined $9 billion in debt to be rolled over by 2015. Some power companies may already be close to insolvency, facing massive asset write downs on their power stations – in particular, Morwell, Hazelwood, Yallourn W and even Loy Yang A and B. The stark reality of the new carbon pricing regime is that, despite free credits being available in the early years, the viability of long-term operations will be closely scrutinised in 2012 as companies struggle with massive refinancing costs.

This context highlights the struggle for control over this basic form of energy, which many have traditionally seen as an essential public service.

The War on the Internet event, which was co-hosted by EFA and the Australian Greens, was held at Trades Hall in Melbourne on 21st January 2012. It featured:

Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing

This is a video of the talk by Bernard Keane:

War on the Internet event #1 - Bernard Keane from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.

Keane's argument is about the conflict between the internet's interconnectedness and community and the hierarchy of corporations and governments. The latter respond to the challenges thrown up by the former with greater surveillance of internet communities and attacks on the flow of information. In the Australian context we have seen extra powers being given to ASIO in the Cyber Crime bill.

Pokies reform has ground to a slow grind. Andrew Wilkie did not have the numbers in the House of Representatives and the NSW backbench of the Labor Party was scared off by the campaign run by Clubs Australia against mandatory pre-commitment. It's another indication of the lack of political courage given the public support for pokies reform.

What we have is a delayed introduction to mandatory pre-commitment, slipping out to 2016, and only after a "full trial" of the measures in Canberra and the Australian Capital Territory from February 2013.

Mandatory pre-commitment has already been trialled in South Australia, in Queensland and in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia (see the Productivity Commission). These showed a significant number of gamers used the pre-commitment schemes to monitor and limit their daily expenditure. That means reduced income for the clubs.

Three different candidates have won the opening three contests in the Republican presidential primaries highlighting the fractured nature of the Republican party in 2012. With Santorum winning Iowa, Romney New Hampshire and Gingrich South Carolina, the battle now moves to Florida.

Although Romney has a double-digit poll lead in Florida, it may turn out that the selection process shapes up as a Romney-Gingrich battle set to be fought state by state, month by month. That would be media heaven.

We can wave Rick Santorum goodbye in the near future. He is almost broke so cannot fund an expensive ad campaign in Florida, and there is less support in the state for his brand of social conservatism popular with Christian evangelicals. Romney now faces a troubling reality: He’s lost two of the first three contests, with his only victory coming in what is essentially his home state.

Australia is part of the global economy. Quarry Australia, for instance, is dependent on Chinese demand for raw materials for its economic growth and it has to live with Chinese forms investing in Australia's digital economy. Though Australians are happy to invest in property overseas--the cottage in southern France--they are uneasy about Asians buying property in Australia--despite the existence of Chinatown in most state capitols.

If we dig a little deeper we uncover the bedrock of racism: it's okay for Americans to buy the farm but not the Chinese embodied in the Spooner cartoon. This refers back to the colonial past before Federation in 1901 with Frederick McCubbin's Down on His Luck (1889), which depicts an unlucky gold prospector contemplating his future as he sits by a small campfire in the Australian bush. The gold prospector stands for the national character.

The US Congress is about to pass what has been called the internet censorship bill, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. The Senate is scheduled to vote on its version of the internet censorship bill on Tuesday, January 24th, and unless there are 41 senators to voice their opposition to allowing the bill to proceed, it is expected to pass.

The Obama White House has come out against it and some Republicans are now starting to come come out against the legislation. There is extensive online protest, some of it innovative.

Legislation called the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House are purported to be a way to crack down on online copyright infringement. In reality the bill is much broader. It would empower governments and corporations to take down virtually any website, create new liabilities and uncertainties for web innovators, and make the web less safe.

According to the varied and multitudinous reasons large numbers of sites and individuals are opposed to the bill, it betrays basic American tenets, such as free speech, prosperity, and national security. On top of all that, cybersecurity experts say it wouldn't stop copyright infringement.

The signs are obvious. The Gillard Government is backing away from pokies reform---away from the mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines.

The reason is twofold. First, once the Liberal MP Peter Slipper became the Speaker in the House of Representatives the Gillard Government is no longer dependent on the vote of Andrew Wilkie to remain in power. Secondly, the country independents were not willing to support Wilkies' mandatory pre-commitment scheme.

Andrew Wilkie had demanded that the minority Gillard government force players to set mandatory pre-commitment limits in return for his support for the government, rather than the alternative proposal for maximum bet limits of $1. Labor has dumped that agreement. Reducing the losses of problem gamblers would significantly impact on the profits of the pokies industry.

In his opinion piece----What is wrong with Medicare? ---in the Medical Journal of Australia Tony D Webber argues that the lack of audit control and inability to adapt to change leads to massive waste. He estimates that 2–3 billion dollars are spent inappropriately each year.

One form the waste takes is the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS). This is riddled with misdirected incentives for practitioners, contains items that have not been reviewed despite advances in technology, and has many examples of good public policy thwarted by the MBS rules.

Webber, who is the Director of Professional Services Review that was established to protect the integrity of Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), says that:

In general practice, general practice management plans (GPMPs) and team care arrangements (TCAs) have created opportunities for a bonanza for some practices. Several practitioners I have reported on had admitted that their corporate owner had a business plan based on a defined number of these items claimed every week, irrespective of clinical need. Medicare Australia is also aware that a significant proportion of these plans are not carried out by a patient’s usual doctor’s practice.2 Anecdotally, claiming for clinically unnecessary GPMPs is significant throughout Australia. The policy intent of GPMPs was to provide a higher standard of care for patients with complicated chronic disease. While many doctors use these items appropriately for positive patient outcomes, a proportion of claimed items have added nothing materially to patient care.

From all accounts the effects of the imposed neoliberal austerity (a purging of the rottenness from the system) has resulted in Greece's economy being in shambles, its society in turmoil, and its finances ruined. Yet more cuts are coming even though a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating since the economy shrinks, government revenue falls, and the debt is harder to repay.

Crisis management is the new normal in the EU, but as the EU lacks good mechanisms for crisis management, the European future looks bleak.

Greece is on its knees and its future looks to be one of fiscal bondage and discipline in a world where the economic centre has shift to east Asia-- notably India and China. The EU is now deep in recession and is likely to remain so for some time. Many sovereign states in the EU owe large amounts of debt and are likely unable to pay it all back. They desperately need economic growth but are forced to cut spending, hurting their near-term growth.

What the media industry call "convergence" is all based on the realisation that, since the 1990s, most media – print, audio, video, graphics – have been reduced to the lowest common denominator: bits, the ones and zeroes of binary arithmetic. The TV industry assumed everything would converge on the television set in the living room.

The assumption where was that television industry was shaped in an era when broadcast (few-to-many) organisations were the dominant organizations in our media jungle. During this period electoral success required political parties to buy endless hours of expensive television time for commercials that advertise their virtues and, more often, roundly assail their opponents with often spurious claims. Television ruled and broadcasters shaped our viewing habits, changed our politics and determined how we spent much of our leisure time.

In Politics and Television: How To Level the Field in the blog of the New York Review of Books Max Frankel states in relation to the US that:

It has long been obvious that television ads dominate electioneering in America. Most of those thirty-second ads are glib at best but much of the time they are unfair smears of the opposition. And we all know that those sordid slanders work—the more negative the better—unless they are instantly answered with equally facile and equally expensive rebuttals.

Mike Rann and Kevin Foley have finally gone after a decade of running South Australia. The achievements of their Labor Government for the state during this period have been mostly buried beneath media spin including all the nonsense about having to maintain the state's Triple A rating. There was so much spin during this period that it came to define the Labor government itself; so much so that it lost credibility and public trust.

Can the Labor Government under Jay Weatherill reinvent itself whilst ensuring that car manufacturing (Holden) stays in SA? The argument for ongoing subsidies and government bailouts to a global car industry is that a manufacturing base prevents Australia from being the quarry for the Asia Pacific.

The car is a big issue in SA politics---and it is not limited to General Motors Holden's plans to pull up stakes. Adelaide is car centric. For instance, the lack of comprehensive, long-term public transport plan for the state means that Adelaide City Council vision of an open, liveable city frequented by bikes, pedestrians and public transport commuters not swamped by slow-moving cars remains just a vision.

Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It places the nasties of the internet in the middle of his analysis. The nasties are not just porn or spam. It's the viruses. The openness of the net means that as we load new software on our PCs more and more often that software is rogue—harvesting computing cycles from a PC in order to attack others, stealing personal information, steal network bandwidth or simply frying the PC. Then crash--the blue screen of death.

There have been two responses to the worsening security problem on computers to open platforms. The first reaction to the abuses of openness is to try to lock things down--- which Apple first took with the initial iPhone. No outside code at all was allowed on the phone; all the software on it was Apple’s.

The second model is premised on shifting more and more of software our away from our own devices and into the Internet’s “cloud.” Ztittrain says that:

These technologies can let geeky outsiders build upon them just as they could with PCs, but in a highly controlled and contingent way. This is iPhone 2.0: an iPod on steroids, with a thriving market for software written by outsiders that must be approved by and funneled through Apple. It’s also Web 2.0 software-as-service ventures like the Facebook platform and Google Apps, where an application popular one day can be banished the next.

The Republicans are engaged in using the primaries to sort out who they want to stand against Obama in the 2012 presidential elections. Mitt Romney, their current front runner, isn't liked by the social conservative movement wing at all. Rick (sex cop) Santorium is their man.

However, Mitt Romney will be the nominee against a Democrat president increasingly noted for his cave-ins to regressive Republican brinkmanship, bargaining by obstructionism and normal legislative maneuvering by threats to close down government.

No doubt the Tea Party Republican movement in South Carolina will try to launch an all out assault on Romney with very nasty attack adverts. Romney is potentially vulnerable to the Christian evangelical right as he is a Mormon, a moderate and East Coast establishment. Evangelical Christians are opposed to global warming, evolution and also committed to reducing taxes, reducing the deficit and shrinking the government.

According to the Wall Street Journal Eastman Kodak is readying its papers to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Kodak, based in Rochester, N.Y., claims to have invented digital photography in 1975 but it ceded that market to competitors such as Nikon, Sony and Canon. It hung onto its identity, film, and watched it fade before its eyes. Kodak has been trying to offload its patents--selling its intellectual property to avoid bankruptcy.

The general explanation for Kodak's corporate failure and demise is that, like Polaroid, it failed to adapt to rapidly changing business models and had fallen behind the technology curve. Its outdated model was outdated. Was this due to:

a failure to innovate; or
a failure to anticipate the shift from analogue to digital cameras; or
a failure to compete with the rise of cameras in mobile phones.

Kodak makes a good study for a strategic business analysis or case study such as this one by George Mendes.

The coal industry (ie the big mining mining companies) still call the shot on energy policy in Australia. This is in spite of the carbon dioxide emissions from coal fired power plants being the biggest source of man made CO2 emissions, or the awareness by the Gillard Government that we need to keep global temperature rise below 2ºC (compared to pre-industrial levels). Climate change is, in the words of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen.

It would appear that the government has in part been seduced by an illusion of “clean coal” as part of Australia's energy future. “Clean coal” is still a major public relations offensive by the coal industry that includes a number of dubious “technological fixes” that they claim make burning coal safe for the climate.

It's largely a major public relations offensive because the coal industry is not that serious in terms of investing in "clean coal" and the technology won’t be ready for at least another 20 years. So we just have some vague promises that cover up the blocs and resistance to the reform to cut carbon emissions and achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Dean Starkman in Confidence Game: The limited vision of the news gurus in the Columbia Journalism Review takes on what he calls the future-of-news (FON) consensus developed by Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, and Jay Rosen and others. This he says holds that:

the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.

Climate change denialism is being mugged by the reality of global warming causing sea levels to creep up and stronger waves and currents eating away at the coastline.

Climate change denialism is still politically strong and this power places constraints on reform attempts--eg., the Obama administration know they need to act. But they can’t act, or at least they can’t act at the scale necessary to really change the energy situation. Republicans won’t let them. The White House couldn’t get the emissions trading scheme legislation through Congress.

Across-the-board austerity will weigh heavily on the economic growth in the eurozone and beyond. The politicians' contorted efforts to placate the financial markets results in austerity being piled on austerity. Demand is depressed, economies contract and this makes it harder, not easier for governments to repay their debts Europe's future is one of a prolonged period of stagnation and deflation.

Even if Europe's financial system is stabilised and the eurozone holds together the fragile eurozone banks are likely to cut back lending to Europe's households and businesses.

Britain's path path towards isolation means that it can longer to be influential in Europe and balance the power of France and Germany. Britain’s self-exclusion has weakened the position of many of the smaller member-states of the EU: when EU institutions weaken, they are more likely to be pushed around by France and Germany. France and Germany, the dominant countries in the fiscal compact, are hostile to the European Commission and favour a more ‘inter-governmental’ Europe.

Europe is an economic and political mess, and it is China's main export market. China's exports have slowed due to the economic downturn in the US and the debt crisis in the Eurozone.

Is China becoming the new epi-centre of the economic crisis in the global economy? Paul Krugman raises the question. As we know China's economic growth rested on a few simple foundations such as, keep credit cheap (and investment levels high), wages down, and the currency’s value low against the dollar. Then export your way into double-digit GDP growth. This is the East Asian "model" of development and it is based on the over-dependence on export markets with its consequences of environmental degradation.

During the global financial crisis in order to maintain high employment, China poured money into infrastructure and real estate projects through its stimulus packages.This decoupled China from the problems of the rest of the world for a couple of years.

Krugman's analysis is that behind China increasingly relying on its trade surpluses to keep manufacturing afloat is the domestic danger spot of the economy over heating.

Recent growth has relied on a huge construction boom fueled by surging real estate prices, and exhibiting all the classic signs of a bubble. There was rapid growth in credit — with much of that growth taking place not through traditional banking but rather through unregulated “shadow banking” neither subject to government supervision nor backed by government guarantees. Now the bubble is bursting...

Will the Gillard Government retain its commitment to pokies reform? Recall that it is concerned over both the extent of a gambling problem (116,000 people with one and and another 279,000 on the path to one), and the consequences on themselves and their families in the form of broken homes, suicides, neglected kids and ruined lives.

Or has the Gillard Government and its shaky coalition been spooked by the campaign run by Clubs Australia? Do we have a minority Labor government that has lost its beliefs in social justice? Is it the case that Gillard had to agree to things she had ruled out beforehand to secure the support of the independent?

Will Abbott be able to use the issue to annihilate Labor? From a marketing perspective Abbott has succeeded in trashing the Labor brand and its countered by Labor painting Abbott as negative. However it is hard to paint pokies reform as yet more in the way of deficiencies, mistakes and incompetence.