Congratulations Brian, You’re Fab!

Front page of the Irish Times today, along with a photo of what looks like Cowen pegging a snow ball at a social welfare recipient:

Cowen says 2009 most difficult year of his political life

“TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen has described the past 12 months as the most difficult of his political life but has insisted that the economic situation has been stabilised as a result of the measures his Government has taken.”

Seems like Fintan O’Toole was right when he said the terms of the debate have been set and the papers can do nothing but adhere to them. Cowen laid out a list of achievements and a timetable, and here we are 98 days later with letters of congratulation from both the Irish Independent and the Irish Times.

Cowen clears hurdles but he must get off the fence

“The hurdles Cowen identified back at the start of September — “the Lisbon Treaty, restructuring the banking and bringing forward the Budget” — are all overcome, provided Budget 2010 passes, as expected. The Taoiseach can justifiably breathe a sigh of relief at his Government remaining intact.”

How Brian Cowen’s 100 crucial days played out

“All of these Deputies supported the Budget despite speculation that some or all of them might go overboard. Cowen and Carey were also the prime movers at Cabinet in bringing forward the Social Welfare Bill by a week. This passed through the Dáil on Friday December 11th – which was 98 days after Cowen first spoken about a crucial hundred days for the country on the Late Late Show.”

Politics.ie has serious questions to answer

21 December

David Cochrane has now posted the following statement about security and privacy issues at Politics.ie which seems to answer concerns about these matters.  His statement: 

“Folks,

Planned not posting tonight, but things appear to have gotten a bit mad on here over the weekend.

1. I have not passed any information about any user to anyone.

2. Moderators do not via this website have access to the email addresses of users of this website (which is the only information that would be considered personal information).

3. I’ve alluded a few times to the Gardai as a resolution option for members of this website who have been subject to harassment and abuse both on this website and elsewhere.

That’s it – a member of the Gardai hasn’t been invited to look at any information – and that simply will not happen unless as part of a criminal investigation.

If anyone have any concerns of this nature, please drop me an email – david@politics.ie and I’ll ensure any concerns are addressed immediately. “

Not sure if this deals with the issue of ’security’ personnel having access to the site or not but the assurance that nobody has access to private information covers that, I suppose.  In any case, my original post (below) needs to be considered in the context of Cochrane’s statement which supercedes it.  The banning of Cactusflower is bizarre, however.  She has done nothing whatever to warrant that.    

My original post:

The banning of the much respected poster ‘Cactusflower’ on politics.ie has given rise to serious controversy about what exactly the site and its owner, David Cochrane are doing.  There is a suggestion, and so far as I’m aware at present it is just a suggestion, that Guards and an unspecified ’security’ person or people may be involved in the moderation of the site.  That would entail access to the registration information provided by posters and any private message correspondence taking place between them.  ‘Cactusflower’ herself has written an open letter to David Cochrane – text below – in which she sets out her concerns and asks for a public statement from Cochrane which so far (Sunday 20th December) has not been forthcoming, so far as I am aware:

“David Cochrane
Site Owner
Politics.ie

Cc P.ie members

From Cactusflower

David,

Re: Privacy and Intimidation Issues on Politics.ie

You recently invited Politics.ie members to contact you on any on-site issues. Some issues have come up recently in relation to privacy policy on Politics.ie and also in relation to threatening and intimidating behaviour on site. I have previously referred to these issues on your “Stop the Trolling” thread.

P.ie operates as an open political forum in which members can opt to post anonymously.
P.ie holds data provided by members (user names and associated email addresses) which is given solely for the purposes of registration, notifications and logging in. The forum is generally understood to offer an opportunity for open political discussion with members operating on equal terms.

Privacy on a discussion board can never be 100% guaranteed, as there’s always the possibility of hacking or leakage. There have been several incidences of “outings” on P.ie and there have been accidental releases of information from other discussion forums.

However, wilful, systemic or malicious breach of members privacy is another matter and would not in my opinion be acceptable. All websites that hold personal data are required to have a Privacy Statement. The absence of a Privacy Statement on Politics.ie in my opinion should be of concern to you and to all members.

Privacy controls on P.ie are unclear. In the last three weeks I have been told by more than one poster on P.ie that the name I used in registering my membership has been “bandied about” by a group or clique of site members (which included at least one moderator), in a hostile and physically threatening context.

In addition, a member of the same group used that same name in an abusive pm to me, clearly with the intention to intimidate and harrass. This same member has (I’m told) threatened violence against me in writing. I asked him several times on two threads how he obtained my registration name and he refused to reply.

It also appears possible (from a recent post) that a member of the same group, who is not a moderator, has had access to members’ private messages

Yet another member of the former user-group has recently claimed that one of this group is a Guard who knows the “real” identity of another site member. Questions about both Guard role and site privacy arise, if this is true. If untrue, it was an unacceptable untruth by the poster, intended to intimidate.

.

All of this information was provided on site and can be substantiated. I have kept screen grabs of the relevant posts for my records.

I also note that you propose in your recent “Stopping Trolls” Opening Post to involve “security” and the Gardai in the internal management and scrutiny of the Politics.ie website. While I support efforts to reduce trolling and don’t support any illegal behaviour, I would like to enquire if you believe this will be compatible with the privacy of members’ data.

The future (and present) of Politics.ie – Stopping the Trolls

P.ie members, myself included, have supported, and continue to support, your efforts to overcome the various problems P.ie has been experiencing. I am sure that these issues can be solved if an open and serious effort is made to deal with them. I am requesting you to take steps to introduce a Privacy Statement and policy and to deal with the other issues I’ve raised here in relation to privacy and personal attacks.

As a precaution, I provided this message to a number of Site Members on the understanding that one of them will post it as an OP if I am banned.

Cactusflower 18 December 2009

Update

I was banned on the evening of 18th December without explanation. I request an
explanation for the banning, the opportunity to respond to any alleged reason and reinstatement of my membership.

The pretext I believe may have been that I had read tweets of a member, dot. II would like to point out that twitter is an open medium ( unless privacy settings are selected) . dot advertises her blog on P.ie, has widely published her blogger identity as being dot and takes every opportunity to maximize the audience of her blogs. Imo any such complaint would be ludicrous beyond belief.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter

__________________

Read this book

Favouring the Rich – A Media Prerogative?

A new MediaShot available here.

“NO one is actively celebrating the achievement of a further €4 billion fiscal adjustment”

so says Garret FitzGerald.

“Cutting civil and public servants’ wages…Slashing welfare rates…Cutting child benefit…Taking all these steps in a single budget would once have been in the realm of political fantasy land. Yet that is what the Government did this week. Coming at the end of a year in which income taxes were increased dramatically and a public sector pension levy was introduced, it is truly extraordinary. For all the talk about his leadership style, our relatively novice Taoiseach deserves credit for carrying his Cabinet, his party and his Dáil majority through for these necessary draconian measures.” [Noel Whelan, Irish Times]

“The Government didn’t lose a single TD or any of its Independent supporters in the vote on the first cut in social welfare rates since Ernest Blythe’s budget of 1924. That is a tribute to the skill with which the public was softened up for the measure and the way it was packaged and delivered.” [Stephen Collins, Irish Times]

“There will be many editorials written about the harshest budget in the history of the State. Suffice to say, on first reading, that the decisions taken rise up to the occasion financially. They were courageous, bold, above party politics, above sectional interest and they appear to have put the country first.” [Editorial, Irish Times]

“Cowen finally walks the walk…WHATEVER your opinion of the National Asset Management Agency, the outcome of the Lisbon Treaty referendum or Budget 2010, you have to admit that Brian Cowen’s Government, despite being probably the most unpopular in the history of the state, is managing to get a lot done…This week’s strong start could be undermined by any weakening of resolve.” [Editorial, Irish Independent]

“Despite the harsh nature of the budget, there is still a lot of pain to come and we can be certain that this time next year, we will be struggling to come up with another €4 billion in fiscal adjustment. There is no choice however, and at least the minister is now addressing the key issues in a reasonably strong manner. Some measures to stimulate employment, such as cutting employers’ PRSI would have been welcome, but we can’t have everything.” [Jim Power, Irish Examiner]

Gogartygate: Letter to Irish Examiner

12 December 2009

Dear Sir
 
As reported in today’s Irish Examiner, Deputy Paul Gogarty (Green) was to be heard in the Dail yesterday afternoon attempting to persuade Deputy Emmet Stagg (Labour) – and the country at large of the sincerity of his conviction that while inflicting savage cuts on those who cannot afford them might be a wrong thing, it was also a necessary thing. Deputy Stagg evidently had some understandable difficulty with the internal contradiction in Deputy Gogarty’s assertion. At any rate, I think I might have worked out what Mr Gogarty must be driving at: the cuts are a wrong thing in so far as they severely penalise those who are innocent of responsibility for the government’s incompetence and mismanagement; but they are a necessary thing in so far as to say so keeps Mr Gogarty earning approximately 120K per year and the Green Party in power propping up the same incompetent government. I apologise in advance for the unparliamentary language of what I am about to say – and I hope he will take this on the chin for the country – but fuck Paul Gogarty. And fuck the Green Party. Again, my profuse apologies for the unparliamentary nature of what I just said. I’ve become a little thin skinned about suffering cringe-making, self-serving rationalisations from Green Party Deputies.

Yours sincerely

Miriam Cotton

TRNN Exclusive on Honduran Election Fraud

Dear Paddy Smyth [Irish Times Foreign Editor],

Will the Irish Times be covering election fraud in Honduras? The RealNews covered it here [below]. Or will the Times’ Latin America coverage be made up of misleading factoids, “Opposition candidate Porfirio Lobo won a presidential election on Sunday, which was scheduled before the coup,” and cynical US platitudes, “The vote could allow Honduras to move on from the five-month crisis and focus on a new leader.”

Best wishes,

David

1. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4573

2. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/1203/breaking44.html

via…http://www.canuckmediamonitor.org/

Irish Examiner has made itself the sworn enemy of public sector workers

Everyone knows the Irish Examiner is a Fine Gael newspaper and everyone equally knows that even if Fianna Fail is being obnoxious about public sector workers, Fine Gael would be even worse.  The incessant cry from FG over the past two years has been for the savaging of the sector.  ‘More! More!’ they scream like a mob braying for the burning of a bewildered woman suddenly accused of being a witch.

 Accordingly the editorials and commentary in the Examiner have almost without exception come down in favour of cuts in welfare and pay of the lowest paid in society, one way or another.  Fergus Finlay (the nearest thing to a working class columnist the paper has) has generally been suggesting it’s all a matter of style rather than of substance and that had the government only gone about the same strategy differently the hoi poloi wouldn’t be as upset as they are.

Why in the name of God does the Government need a report to tell it what is both the right thing to do and the strategic thing to do? If this Government had been ruthless about top pay – especially its own, and especially the bonuses that some senior managers have been offered – and if they had been ruthless right from the beginning, people throughout the country would have been far more willing to follow them.
(Read more.)

In any case Finlay has now declared himself against strikes which begs the question of the former Labour Party spokesperson: how the hell do we get these liars and thieves to take us seriously otherwise? Asking them nicely has never worked before, it isn’t working now and the main opposition parties have abandoned us all by signing up to what are essentially identical economic policies, despite all the sympathetic rhetoric.   Speaking on The Frontline while in Dublin recently Noam Chomsky stated an obvious fact: no government has ever conceded any point of democracy or fairness without being forced to do so by the people themselves.  Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore has already stated categorically that he will do nothing to change the outrageous and almost certainly criminal NAMA legislation if Labour are elected to government.  That alone tells us everything we need to know about the pointlessness of voting for Labour.

In recent weeks Examiner columnist and fomer FG front bencher Ivan Yates has been shrilly defending subsidies to horse racing while demanding the evisceration of the public sector.  He has even implied that these subsidies might help reduce the soaring male suicide rate.    

Today, the paper is palpably afraid that the flooding crisis ably demonstrates who it is the country has to turn to when real rather than recklessly induced disaster strikes: the very people whose pay, pensions and welfare are to be targetted within a few weeks.   Flooding ‘washes away sympathy for strike’ claims the headline over the editorial.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  It is public sector workers who have been working night and day to deal with the effects on people of the failures of government and environmental management as much as of the weather itself.   Incredibly, the Examiner editorial accuses the unions of selfishness at this time of crisis, even though emergency service members have already said they will not strike in the affected areas.

Not to be outdone for viciousness by any editorial writer, Terry Prone, predictably, is in on the act.  We’ve written about Prone before: she of the sumptuous salaries at public sector expense who has been selling the lie of Fianna Fail’s Cletic Tiger economic ‘miracle’ more than any other.    Lest anybody should begin to notice just how tirelessly and selflessly professional public sector workers have been coping with the flood disaster, Prone is desperate to insist it is really the smiling and laughing,  volunteer tea and sandwich makers who are the heroes of the hour.  Not that anyone wants to diminish their undoubted and considerable contribution but there’s that divisive theme again: public sector v volunteer; public sector v private sector – the former always coming off worse than the latter, however they are paired for comparison purposes - as if professionally trained people’s skills were superfluous and their lesser motives a given.  Prone invites us to consider the joyous liberation of being dispossessed of homes and possessions to free us up for real camaraderie and pulling together.  Never mind the destroyed and damaged homes, the lost businesses, the likelihood of dole queue living for many people as a consequence of the flood – think of all the fun it will be while our betters get on with fleecing us of any vestige of hope or the wherewithall to edcuate our children decently or even to survive.  Prone’s latest article can be read here.

 And speaking of dole queues, Prone was last week bending her talents to working some class distinction into them.  Apparently there are those like her pinstripe-suited friend who are the more deserving poor and who should queue up early in the mroning to avoid those who she says wear ‘pyjamas’ and tend to queue later in the day.  Oh and apparently last time we all had to emigrate because of similarly induced financial mismanagement, we were doing it ‘for fun’.   On top of all of this offensive nonsense, Prone is also trying to make out that there is a need for a similar response to the economic crisis as to the flooding crisis.  Not on your well pampered nelly, there is not, Terry.  It’s no act of God that brought economic disaster on us but the continuing greed and ruthless incompetence of our government and the eocnomic system whose altar they worship at.  It is not just about pay and cuts that we will strike but to make these out of control oligarchs and their political prostitutes  realise that the game they are playing with our futures is doomed.  We’re not putting up with it any longer.  Most of us always knew it was bullshit anyway but it is time now for us take over from the delinquents who are running the show and replace them with adults who will govern according to the wishes and needs of the majority.   Striking is the first step along the way until they come to their senses.   Contrary to what the likes of Prone and others are spinning furiously in the media, it is not the public sector who are going through the five stages of grief or who are playing the ‘blame game’, it is the government itself which is in deep denial and is lashing out at the electorate in anger.

Richard Keeble on the latest crisis in journalism

“Journalists are, indeed, obsessed with this notion of crisis. It makes for good headlines, titles of books and, indeed, conferences. As our sunny Jim story suggests, if there isn’t a crisis journalists will quickly invent one.

Certainly since I started in journalism in 1970, there has been constant talk of crisis. And since becoming a hackacademic in 1984 (a pleasantly symbolic year for an Orwellian such as myself) I’ve constantly been giving lectures dispelling myths about “The crisis in journalism”.

First the media were supposedly under the grip of trade unions. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Murdoch sorted out that problem. Next the arrival of new technology in the 1980s supposedly meant that upstart publishers like Eddie Shah would threaten the dominance of the traditional proprietors: the Rothermeres, Beaverbrooks, the Maxwells and the Murdochs. And throughout this period the sense of crisis has been linked to a constant moral panic over media standards – dumbing down became the catch phrase with concerns focused on TV promotion of the soundbite culture, the obsession with celebrities, sensationalism, sleaze and so on. The emergence of the internet and the blogosphere next threatened professional journalists’ monopoly on reporting in the public sphere. A series of broadcasting scandals supposedly critically damaged the public’s trust in TV. For Nick Flat Earth News Davies, Fleet Street is in acute crisis since it has become a mere extension of planet PR with demon spin-doctors in control.” [Crisis: what crisis?, Richard Keeble]

via the Media Lens blog.

Irish Examiner hell bent on public sector worker bashing

Here’s the latest instalment in the Irish Examiner’s ongoing war of attrition against the selfish, vile and evil people also known as public sector workers:

http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/editorial/day-of-protest–marching-wont-rescue-the-economy-104922.html

And a reply sent off this morning:

“And so another Irish Examiner editorial completely misses the point about why public sector workers are marching and striking. For the record, we are trying to secure demonstrable fairness for ALL workers, not just for ourselves. The inequalities that your leader writer points to in the private sector are an abomination. The solution to them is not to inflict the same misery on public sector workers – the vast majority of whom are not well paid in any case. We must work together to rid ourselves of the outrageous sense of privilege and entitlement at the top of both the public and private sectors. It is a barefaced lie to insist that the savings that need to be made cannot be made other than by inflicting poverty and deprivation on the majority. There are hundreds if not thousands of measures that could be taken without doing that. But private sector vested interests have the ear of government and our fat and pampered politicians concede to every request they make of them. We will write whatever cheques are necessary for them, says Brian Cowen. Your columnist Ivan Yates, who also never tires of lecturing public sector workers on the need for pay and welfare cuts, could nevertheless be heard on Matt Cooper’s radio programme in recent days forcefully defending massive subsidies for horseracing which the government had timidly suggested might be cut back. Yates and his fellow worshippers at the Irish Church of Gambling were incandescent and the idea has been dropped. Could anything be more offensive and provoking? The fact is that the crisis is being deliberately and needlessly exploited to usher in a severe economic ideology designed to maintain a system of privileges for the rich propped up by a sub-class of dirt cheap and powerless labour: that’s the prize which the plotters at IBEC have firmly in their sights. Indeed the policy wonks at the IMF have been advising governments everywhere that the crisis represents a great ‘opportunity’ in this respect. Notice too how we are being prepared for the idea that the measures being taken against us will be permanent. We will fight and resist the miserable fate that is being coldly planned for us with every legal means at our disposal – no matter how the recklessly divisive and big-business dependent media attempt to spin it against us. “