Monthly Archives: May 2012

MACAVITY

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Biased BBC’s Alan notes

“As you know the BBC had  Mervyn King do a speech for them last night but seem rather shy about revealing some the contents so far…

Mervyn King in a speech for the BBC Today programme states that because Labour’s economic policies and failure to control the banks we have lost 1 million jobs in the UK.
The Telegraph has a report here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9242161/Labour-lost-a-million-jobs-says-Bank-chief.html

The BBC website hides the high profile speech on the politics page and fails to mention Labour losing us 1 million jobs but does blame King for the recession and states that ‘He also admitted the BoE should have done more to avert the banking crisis.’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17929120

The BBC then bring on Labour’s pet economist who writes for the New Statesman and the Guardian promoting Labour’s policy of more borrowing and spending ……
‘However, David Blanchflower, a former member of the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, accused Sir Mervyn of being “disingenuous”.
“If Mervyn King had thought more regulation was important he could’ve done something about it. And because he didn’t he must take responsibility for the fact the Bank of England missed the biggest financial crisis in a century,” he told BBC Radio 5 live.’

What did King say?

‘So why, you might ask, did the Bank of England not do more to prevent the disaster? We should have. But the power to regulate banks had been taken away from us in 1997. Our power was limited to that of publishing reports and preaching sermons.
With the benefit of hindsight, we should have shouted from the rooftops that a system had been built in which banks were too important to fail, that banks had grown too quickly and borrowed too much, and that so-called ‘light-touch’ regulation hadn’t prevented any of this.
From the beginning of 2008, we at the Bank of England began to argue that UK banks needed extra capital – a lot of extra capital, possibly £100 billion or more. It wasn’t a popular message. But nine months later, market pressure forced banks to raise new capital or accept it from the state. UK tax payers ended up owning large portions of two of our four biggest banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB, but almost all banks would have failed had not taxpayer support been extended. That bold action in October 2008 could have happened sooner.
Bailing out the banks came too late though to prevent the financial crisis from spilling over into the world economy.
Over 25 million jobs disappeared worldwide. And unemployment in Britain rose by over a million.’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9718000/9718062.stm
　
Couldn’t be much clearer even in diplomatic speak….power to regulate the banks was taken away from the BoE by Labour in 1997, Brown’s ‘light touch’ regulation failed to control the banks, the BoE warned Brown from the start of 2008 to pump capital into the banks, a warning which was ignored, and that Labour’s failure to control the economy cost over 1 million jobs.

Astonishing cover up for Brown who fails to get a name check. This is a speech commissioned by the BBC itself, for its most prestigious political news programme ‘Today’ and yet the story is buried on the ‘back pages’ and anything detrimental to Labour removed or ‘neutralised’ by an opposing voice.

It is a sure bet that if King had said Osborne must change tack and adopt the mythical ‘Plan B’ it would be front page news. Labour does not need large political donations to fund its campaigns when it has the taxpayer funding its  propaganda arm through the BBC license fee.

Ethical Woman

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Rowlatt is an unusual name, so it didn’t surprise me to learn that Bee is Justin’s other half. Bee is a BBC World Service producer, so should she really be participating in the Palestinian Festival of Literature (affectionately known as PalFest) as Hadar Sela recounts here? Not that anyone could object to a lovely cultural festival of booky wooks written by the Guardian’s favourite authors, poets, and literary geniuses.

Or could they?

When does a literary fest become a hate-fest? When it’s full of Guardian writers, Pro-Palestinian activists and anti-Israel propagandists.

The PalFest website states:

‘“For the first time, PalFest will conduct activities in besieged Gaza, where Palestinians continue to resist Israel’s illegal blockade which has transformed the occupied Gaza Strip into the world’s largest prison camp. PalFest is a sign of the growing solidarity across borders in our struggle against racism and oppression. Intellectuals and writers played a key role in ending Apartheid in South Africa; likewise, Arab cultural figures are visiting Gaza this year to show solidarity with Palestinian academics and artists in support for their call to increase the global BDS campaign against apartheid Israel.”

“On behalf of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel(PACBI), we deeply appreciate the Arab writers’ principled and consistent support for the Palestinian civil struggle for justice and peace in Palestine.”

“British authors Rachel Holmes and Bee Rowlatt will lead extended creative writing workshops in Birzeit with the Palestine Writing Workshop.”

So, BBC World service producer Mrs Ethical Man is promoting the  ill-conceived, mendacious smear that multicultural Israel resembles South Africa under apartheid, and campaigning for BDS. Nice.

Question Time LiveChat 3rd May 2012

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Tonight Question Time comes from Question Time from London for the second week in a row – presumably because the BBC chickened out of the promised Mayoral Special last week.

On the panel: Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith MP,
Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Hatemen MP, former leader of the Liberal
Democrats Sir Walter “Ming” Campbell MP, leader of the PCS union and semi-detached nutter Mark Serwotka and the businessman and panelist on Dragons’ Den Theo Paphitis

Your Moderators line-up consists of David Vance, David Mosque, TheEye and John Ward.

At 11:35pm (UK time) the BBC’s election coverage will begin so we will probably keep the chat window open for a while longer to watch the early biased punditry.

Mistaken Identity

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Honest reporting alerted me to this Yolande Knell report. Anyone familiar with the UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk and Yolande Knell would not be not surprised to see that the shoogly peg upon which Ms. Knell hung her article was yet another of Falk’s condemnations of Israel. Falk has featured on this website more than once.

Before the article was stealth edited  the BBC got his name wrong, such was its haste to spread Falk’s word. Knell’s piece provided Robin Shepherd with ‘another of those do-I-laugh-or-do-I-cry moments’. He calls it ‘flagrant anti-Israel propaganda.’

The BBC frequently cites Falk on the Middle East, but it persistently fails to define him as the anti Israel fanatic he obviously is. Calling him Robert was a silly mistake, but why bother with the details when you’ve got some anti-Israel material to publicise?

The best ‘Rob to Rich’  joke wins.

NAUGHTY LOUISE

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Well then, hasn’t Louise Mensch gone and irritated the BBC? How very dare she suggest that the blessed Tom Watson has jumped the gun and compromised the very essence of the Parliamentary Committee system by insisting that Rupert Murdoch is “unfit to run a major news organisation”. Leaving aside the irony of a bunch of MP’S who have run little more than  a bath judging the incredibly commercially successful Murdoch, the BBC wasn’t going to take this lightly. There was a hilarious item on Today at 7.50am. They brought on Tony Wright, (Labour) Chair of the Public Administration Committee, and Paul Farrelly (Labour) member for the DCMS Committee. Farrelly was brought on to counter Mensch’s allegation that the issue of Murdoch’s competency to run a financial institution had NOT been discussed before Monday of this week. After some weaseling, he stated that she was indeed wrong and that the issue HAD been discussed. So, in essence he was calling her a liar. BBC mission accomplished. Wright was more measured but stated he shared the same view on Murdoch as Farrelly and Watson, so natch! Clearly this was a stitch up job and the only thing that gave me a laugh was after this little bit of character assassination on Mensch and Murdoch., the BBC had to report that BSky reported record profits. That said, it is clear the BBC is determined to decouple Murdoch from control of BskyB in order to ruthlessly reinforce it’s monopolistic position over broadcast media in the UK.

BBC Censorship: Occupiers Arrested In Plot To Blow Up Bridge Edition

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UPDATE: The BBC just posted a news brief about it after all. But the association of the criminals with the Occupy Movement is censored. Instead, they quote a DoJ mouthpiece saying the plot had nothing to do with the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death. LOL! We all know what this was going to celebrate, and the BBC won’t admit it.

Today is May Day, a prominent day in Communist history. Some non-Left blogs last year started calling this “Victims of Communism Day”, in remembrance of the tens of millions of victims of Communists in pursuit of their goals.

Today the BBC has done a quick hype of their darling Occupiers, who are using May Day to cause violence and disrupt civilized society. Of course, that’s not how the BBC tells it. The news brief is full of hype and positive vibes about these people.

Censored by the BBC:

Terror Plot Suspects Appear In Court

Federal authorities on Tuesday morning announced that five people were arrested in Cleveland for allegedly conspiring to use explosives to blow up a local bridge.

Steven M. Dettelbach, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, and Stephen D. Anthony, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cleveland office, discussed the arrests and subsequent charges related to what they referred to as a “national security case.”

A news conference was held Tuesday morning at the Cleveland FBI headquarters at 1501 Lakeside Avenue.

Fox 8′s Stacey Frey reports that the suspects have been identified as Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; Joshua Stafford, 23; Connor Stevens, 20; and Douglas Wright, 26. Baxter, Hayne and Wright were arrested Monday night by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on charges of conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce.

A criminal complaint filed Tuesday morning states that Baxter, Hayne and Wright are self-proclaimed anarchists who formed a small group that considered a series of plots over several months.

Self-proclaimed anarchists? Try self-proclaimed Occupiers.

Brandon Baxter: Occupy Cleveland organizer

Occupy Cleveland May Day festivities cancelled because five of them were arrested

FBI met the at OWS event

Screenshots of all their Facebook pages

This must be more of that love for humanity and sense of civic duty Katty Kay was telling us about, and which Paul Mason is celebrating on Newsnight. I pretty much saw this coming after spending a few hours among these darlings of the BBC.

What I mean is that these people can keep doing this for a very long time. And eventually, they’re going to realize that it isn’t working.  Will they fess up and become a ready-made cadre of Obamessiah activists?  I don’t know. If not, the emotions will have driven many of them into a frenzied state over time. Fighting the man, speaking truth to power, getting arrested over and over again, and watching a seemingly endless stream of video clips of their comrades fighting with police, getting pepper-sprayed and bundled into police vans will not yield a happy result.  Like we heard from a couple people, they all seriously think that obstructing traffic and infringing on other people’s space and property is their right. Freedom of speech and right to peaceable assembly and all that. What they tragically fail to understand is that, unlike many blacks in the South before the Civil Rights movement, they can exercise their right to vote without fear, and all this glorious civil disobedience is unnecessary extremist nonsense.  The Tea Party movement has proven that they don’t need to do any of this. I found only a couple of people who even remotely grasped this point.  So I think the violent confrontation – always started by the nasty fascist police infringing on their rights, bien sur – will become a kind of ouroburossian (if that’s not a word, it is now) reality. They’ll continuously create situations which they’ll interpret as justifying their cause, projecting onto it false equivalences with everything from Wat Tyler to the German Peasant Rebellion to Gandhi to MLK and the Civil Rights movement. That’s when you’ll really start to see the stuff the BBC told you would never happen over here.

 

SWIMMING THROUGH THE BIAS?

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A reader rightly asks why is Anders Behring Breivik anything to do with the death of a Norwegian Swimming Champion?  It seems entirely irrelevant but there it is – 5 sentences into this sad story of the death of a young Norwegian swimmer. Could it be that the BBC wants to reinforce and remind us as regards its’ narrative of right-wing views being threatening and associated with this gunman? What do the actions of a clinically-insane, steroid-abusing mad-man have anything to do with this?

KHAT GOT YOUR TONGUE…?

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Now this is a strange report on the BBC.  First the essential detail;

“Seven people have been arrested on suspicion of funding overseas terrorism with money linked to smuggling of the stimulant khat. The Metropolitan Police said six men and a woman were arrested in London, Coventry and Cardiff in early morning raids by counter-terrorism officers.”

That’s quite a number of alleged terrorist supporters. So, what angle does the BBC take? Which terrorist group was getting funded? No idea. Where was this overseas terrorism taking place? Can’t say. However the ace BBC reporters are there to advise that…. Khat is a stimulant favoured by older Somali men. No further line of questioning is pursued. It’s as if the BBC is nimbly dancing by the Islamic elephant in the room, and NOT for the first time.

THAT MURDOCH JIHAD

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It’s so blatant it is unbelievable, isn’t it? I’m talking, of course, about the BBC’s continued frenzied coverage of the News Corp “phone hacking” issue.  This gets massive lead story emphasis on the UK news page, and other stories are relegated to minor importance. From where I stand, the BBC is clearly conducting a witchhunt against Murdoch with the intention of maximising it’s already monopolistic position in UK media. It’s a travesty that a weak willed Cameron idly stands by and let’s the BBC away with this. I suspect it is because he too is afraid of the power of the monster that presents itself as lovable old Auntie Beeb but as anyone with an ounce of wit understands, appeasers that feed a crocodile thinking it will devour them last…still end up devoured! We see this on daily basis as the BBC acts as the unofficial cheerleader for Labour. But it’s sheer 24/7 media power means that whilst some of us here see the danger, many others STILL actually trust the beast and are manipulated into thinking what it wants. I’ve said it before but I will say it again, the BBC as currently constituted is the biggest danger to the UK.