fpb | (no subject)

One of the early signals of Murdoch-poisoning is the way that people mistake enemies and manage to convince themselves that they are valiant for going after targets both wrong and feeble while the real villains are left untouched. Luckily, in the USA there still are a few people who have not been poisoned by Murdoch's lies, and it seems, according to this report, that last Thursday the most prominent of them proceeded to give Fox-TV exactly what it deserved:

Thursday night's "Daily Show" featured Jon Stewart doing what he does best: calling out hypocrisy in the media. After a segment on the intensified battle between Gov. Scott Walker and Wisconsin unions, Stewart took a look at how Fox News was reporting on the story, specifically compared to how they covered similar threats to the Bush tax cuts and bailed-out bank CEOs' salaries.

Stewart showed plenty of pundits saying that when it comes to taxing those who make $250,000 a year, you're taxing people who are "not rich" and even "close to poverty" if they have a family of four with kids in college. But when it comes to teachers in Wisconsin, the same pundits say they, as government employees, should expect to see cuts in their ample $50,000 a year salary plus benefits.

In other discussions on Fox News, cuts in teachers' salaries were compared to those of Wall Street executives. Megyn Kelly argued teachers don't deserve as much money because they "don't work as much." Stewart totally understood:

"See the difference? Regardless of the greed-based, almost slightly sociopathic job bankers did wrecking our economy, those people were there every single day, 12 months a year. Not that nine month bullshit!"

Stewart took it even further by showing another level of hypocrisy. Clips showed the same people on the network who agreed with the government limiting teachers' benefits also said that limiting the salaries of government bailed-out CEOs would be detrimental to the industry and "isn't a good way of attracting talent in the future."

"Absolutely, we have got to pay those bailed-out firm CEOs top dollar! Otherwise, those companies could wind up being run by a couple of jackasses who fuck things up so royally, it torpedoes the entire global economy!"

You might say that Stewart was shooting fish in a barrel, and he was. There is something so transparent and shameless about Murdoch's manipulations, that one would think that the least breath of free air would blow him to smithereens. Ah, but then there has to be the breath of free air. Mr.Stewart, God bless him, provided it in this case; but in other areas, it has long since been sucked up out of the environment. Partly it is mere habit and weariness: we have lived with this horror since 1978, longer than many of us have been alive. When people spend a generation denouncing a manifest evil over and over again, with absolutely no success, two things happen: people get tired or shrill, they may get boring, and meanwhile a new generation arises to whom the monstrous things done by the evil in question seem normal and understandable. After all, why shouldn't Murdoch use his media cross-ownership to promote each part of his empire elsewhere? Why shouldn't he use unrestrained sex and nudity to sell? Why shouldn't he misrepresent and lie on practically every subject his newspapers (so-called!) touch? Why, in the end, shouldn't he create a kind of parallel reality in which his customers never even get to hear a real alternative voice, whether the Pope or Alan Rushbridger? It takes someone coming from outside of the whole coccoon of media control and cross-reference, like Mr.Stewart, to point out how shameless, how hollow, how brutally manipulative the whole thing is.

Let's be clear about it: Murdochism is not only bad for children and other living things, it is bad for capitalism and the free market. After all, only a fantasist would pretend that the triumph of Murdochism in Britain has corresponded with a period of entrepreneurship and success. Murdoch's newspapers and TV encourage a plebeian, abject posture, one in which the only areas of interest are sex and "glamour", and in which people look upward to a few chosen (mostly female) objects of interest and scandal, while the real issues of life get passed over in silence. It is an escapist, narrow, mind-destroying experience; what is bad about it is not only that it stuffs the brain with idiot sexual fantasies, but that it reduces and cheapens human experience. And the various media work hand in glove in this, each promoting what I described as the overall coccoon effect of the Murdoch experience. I have lived for a quarter of a century in a country where The Sun's readers left that pornographic and moronic sheet lying around the house for their children to read; and a whole generation has suffered from its effects. Who can imagine that a Sun reader, other things being equal, could summon the self-discipline, ambition and insight it would take to start his own business, or to rise high and succeed professionally? The undermining of self-respect by Murdoch's tabloids, which are the engine of his machine and the gold-mine of his empire, is something I consider palpable.

And Murdoch is a monopolist by instinct: he is on record as saying that Britain - a country with sixty million people - could do very well with three main newspapers instead of the current, already pathetically low number of eleven. The Soviet Communist Party had a richer and more varied media diet than what Murdoch thinks right for a supposed democracy. And of course, two of the three - the Sun and the Times - would be his, while the third would be the Telegraph. It's talk like that that makes you wish the Guardian better success, much though I may loathe it. And he is acting on his talk: he has just graciously allowed his despicable sycophants in the Tory Party - after neutering the one politician, Vincent Cable, who knew him for what he was and was disposed to do something about it - to let him buy out the majority share in his BSkyB satellite TV operation, thus building a crushing media conglomerate that dwarfs even the BBC and reduces every other British competitor to insignificance. He never enters a market except to destroy any opposition; he does not want competition. After all, real competition might mean someone interfering with the opiates he sells his followers - someone like Mr.Stewart.

HBut Britain is no longer enough for him, as in the days when he was a smallish Australian newspaper owner fresh from a few years in Oxford, and the ancient imperial motherland seemed an awesome field of conquest for the new Napoleon. He has long since, using the skills perfected in decades of aggression and conquest, startede operations against the United States: his acquisition of 20th Century Fox dates back to 1985, and it was then that, by taking American citizenship, he signalled to the world his intentions.

That is the strength of this villain: he thinks long term. In Britain he had the windfall of like-minded Margaret Thatcher's 1979 triumph - although he probably foresaw that, as did anyone with a lick of sense - only one or two years after he had bought a half-bankrupt daily called originally the Daily Herald, later The Sun. But in America he has spent more than 25 years purely building up his company's position, working on that process of familiarization with and discounting of the monstrous which is at the heart of his business methods; until people, even its worst enemies, talk of Fox-TV as though it were a natural part of the landscape, something whose presence is unquestioned and obvious, instead of the piratical creation of one detestable human being.

Over the last few years, things have moved to a new stage: Rupert Murdoch is in effect mounting a take-over of the conservative movement and of the Republican Party. Beyond the mere effect of familiarization, he is moving in a hundred ways to identify his company with the conservative movement itself.

His effect on the movement can already be said to have been disastrous. For one thing, principles have been shed. There was a man called Brent Bozell III who had appointed himself the guardian of media morality and impartiality. Whether or not you agree with his principles, they were principles, and when I first came across him he was applying them impartially across the board. He was, in fact, perfectly aware that Fox TV was the worst offender in terms of graphic sex, lurid suggestions and general sleaze - the worst, mind you, in a very bad field - and criticized it strongly and often. But it has been years since Mr.Bozell has last said anything against any of Rupert Murdoch's sleazy shows. What happened? Have Murdoch and his hirelings suddenly got religion and stopped making filthy reality shows and repulsive animation? I don't believe that for a minute; those things are basic to the man and to his empire. No, it is Mr.Bozell who has lost his nerve. His subjects these days are almost always the bad treatment of the Republican Party by the non-Fox media, which he rarely touched in his earlier "glory" days. He has, in fact, become a party hack, all through increasing unwillingness to criticize what is now in effect the flagship of the so-called conservative movement: sleazy, pornified, mendacious, demagogic Fox TV. They are doing so much good work, you see, it would be dangerous to criticize them and give the wretched liberals a handle.

This is happening across the board. Conservative leaders, like Sarah Palin, are hired by Fox, or else Fox creates its own leaders out of nothing at all. I have already pointed out just how absurd it is for a nameless hack like Glenn Beck to place himself in Martin Luther King's shoes by calling a naional protest rally in Washington DC in clear imitation of the hero; but he did, and it succeeded, and nobody even laughed. By now, Fox is in effect at the centre of the conservative movement, and only a few individuals on the right dare call him by the name he has deserved a million times over; and these are either flawed individuals such as the half-mad harridan Debbie Schlussel, isolated and self-regarding persons such as Lawrence Auster, or merely obscure - and sure to stay that way so long as Fox TV is in the ascendant.

The effect is bad and will become worse. Nothing has been as central to the slow and unstoppable rise of the American conservative movement - a rise which long pre-dates the beginning of Rupert Murdoch's hostile activities against the United States - as the complex of issues connected with sexual morality and especially with abortion. It is the so-called social conservatives who built up the movement that now looms across the right of American politics; and it is the disapproval of abortion that has grown from a minority passion to a widespread American view, even a majority view according to some polls. But can we trust Mr.Murdoch as the guardian and defender of their values? Can we Hell. Murdoch already has the weapon by which to sideline and in the long term silence the anti-abortion forces, and redirect the conservative movement where he wants it. Remember, this is a man who thinks long-term (a legacy, perhaps, of his Catholic upbringing). And there is only one principle he really believes in: he believes that Rupert Murdoch should pay less tax, and if possible none at all. And one cannot say that he hasn't practiced his principle. The accounts of News Inernational are a work of genius, pretty close to unique of their kind, I would say: Murdoch is the Beethoven of tax avoidance.

(This lends him a major advantage vis-a-vis any competitor. The newspaper business is a rather unwelcoming one, subject to low margins and sudden slumps. But if a man can pay less tax than his competitors, then he obviously has a built-in advantage.)

Now, I don't say that the Tea Party has arisen just for that; but I don't think it's a coincidence that recently some supposed "leaders" of the Tea Party, an anti-tax movement, have been heard to say that social conservatives should pipe down and stop promoting such "divisive" causes as aborton. I think that we shall find that as time goes on the heat against abortion recedes and an increasingly exclusive anti-tax and anti-state mentality takes over. I am willing to bet on this. Already the prominent anti-abortion website Lfe Site has been speaking of an unexpected sense of loneliness.

This is Rupert Murdoch in all his glory: a pornographer, a violator and bender of laws, a corruptor, a monopolist, a guttersnipe. And even though everyone knows what he is - dear Jesus, we have had time enough to get to know him! - he keeps winning. Britain's loathsome jellyfish government, valiant at the expense of state employees and unemployed people, cowardly before any rich (or even pretend-rich - it has given the bankrupt bankers everything they wanted at the expense of the taxpayers, and asked for nothing back) person, roll over before his media power with disgusting ease, for he is reputed to be able to win and lose elections - a monstrous bluff which depends entirely on his ability to spot a trend and accommodate himself to it. He made friends with Tony Blair at the right time (thank you SO much, Mr.Tony) and dumped his inept successor Gordon Brown at the right time; and on goes the legend of his leading the British electorate - which in fact he follows.

The only man who has ever faced him down and defeated him is - believe it or not - Berlusconi, which proves that it takes a villain to beat a villain. A few years ago, Murdoch set up a Sky Italia operation, with his usual monopolistic intent. Berlusconi smelled the trouble coming - he seems to have been the only man in Italy with a proper appreciation of his enemy - and used every trick of politics and the law to lock him down and reduce him to insignificance. Murdoch repaid him by unleashing a savage international media campaign against Berlusconi and Italy in general, managing what would seem nearly impossible - making Berlusconi out to be worse than he is. (For instance, he used his would-be respectable mouthpiece, The Times of London, to spread a wholly false story that the Italian troops in Afghanistan were paying protection money to the Taliban.) But there is an advantage in not having any reputation to lose: all the harm that Murdoch can do to Berlusconi is in further driving down what is already at zero level - Berlusconi does not need any help in trashing his own international image - and cannot undermine the reasons for Berlusconi's continued business and political success, which have nothing to do with personal respectability; while on the other hand the defeat of Murdoch's attempt to colonize Italy has not only been a real setback in itself, but may have warned Murdoch off the rest of the European market, which is enormous. After all, Berlusconi is not the only shark who swims in European waters, and even the Australian crocodile might beware of such man-eating monsters as the Springer empire in Germany.

(One grimly hilarious side effect of the Battle of Sky Italia has been an apparent alliance between the Italian left, including most of the Italian media, and Murdoch, with the giants of the Italian press - who don't seem to realize that they would have been next on the menu if the Australian crocodile ever got a solid foothold in Italy - discovering wholly unsuspected civic, democratic and progressive virtues in this pornographic, monopolistic, authoritarian guttersnipe. Look, boys'n'gals, go home and fall on your knees in gratitude. Sometimes your enemy's enemy is your enemy too. Compared to Murdoch, Berlusconi is a kindly, vaguely roguish elderly uncle.)

This is Rupert Murdoch in all his glory. I am against the death penalty, but if there were a realistic possiblity to see Murdoch and all his loathsome criminal gang swinging at the ends of a few well-soaped ropes, I'd make an exception. There has to be a punishment for poisoning souls by the million. I have spent the last 25 years watching him poison Britain; now it's the USA turn. He is old, but still not tired; he is still planning for the long term, for more acquisitions, more bribery, more corrupt and corrupting power. Why don't these old iniquities ever die? Is it because even the Devil wants to wait as long as possible before he is forced to endure their company in hell?