from Crikey .....

Doug Cameron joins Labor Left rally to support Julian Assange

Crikey senior journalist Andrew Crook writes:

Home borrowers will be given a one-page fact sheet outlining their monthly mortgage repayments and how they can shop around for a better loan, under new banking reforms unveiled today.

Exit fees, which can run into the thousands, will also be banned from July 1, 2011 and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will be given the power to investigate price collusion among banks.

The federal government has also pledged to spend another $4 billion on residential mortgaged-back securities to help smaller lenders, taking to $20 billion its investment in non-bank players since the onset of the global financial crisis.

I drew the "Starwarts of the Jungle" in 2003 for either a strip cartoon or short animation which I started. Animation is a long long long process. I did not have the right computer programs, so I was making do with iMovie frame by frame, with sound from GarageBand... Then I moved onto Powerpoint with less frames. The characters were of course all the political warts including this one below. I eventually produced a CD with several comments on the iraq war, as "Piece of Peace" in a limited release of 50...

I sold 49 units and kept one for myself...

From 2001 to 2005, before joining this great site, Gus was doing some silly cartoons. For the silly season, or the jolly season for some, Gus will only post toons from the vault... Unfortunately most of these are still relevant today... Gus.

More than 1.1 billion new $100 bills have been put into quarantine while officials search for a solution to a printing problem that has rendered some of the bills unusable, an official familiar with the situation said Monday.

Originally scheduled for a February 2011 release date, the bills were the first run of a high-tech note designed to combat counterfeiting by including a 3-D security ribbon.

The Federal Reserve first acknowledged an issue with the bills in October, but did not specify the scope of the problem.

The latest batch of the several hundred leaked US diplomatic cables concerning Australia, provided by WikiLeaks to the Fairfax company's Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age, provide further extraordinary evidence of Washington's direct involvement in the anti-democratic coup against former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last June.

Former whistleblower and independent MP Andrew Wilkie has issued a scathing attack against the Prime Minister's handling of the WikiLeaks affair.

Mr Wilkie says Julia Gillard is showing contempt for the rule of law by failing to give Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange the presumption of innocence.

Mr Assange was arrested by British police on Tuesday in response to a Swedish warrant on alleged sex crimes and faces possible extradition.

Mark Arbib was first elected to the Senate for New South Wales in 2007.

Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd says it is "water off a duck's back" that the former US ambassador to Australia described him as a "control freak" who made significant blunders.

Writing in a live chat on The Guardian website from an undisclosed location believed to be in Britain, Assange responded to the Australian government's WikiLeaks investigating taskforce and its stated support for America's international manhunt.

The website's founder, who earlier called for the resignation of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, again took direct aim at his accusers.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.