flying a balloon

Can we slay the tyrant, here?

The News of the World hacking scandal that I wrote about in April has become a worldwide phenomenon. The whole world knows how murder victims phones were hacked. More revelations will follow, with other tabloids, including News' other tabloid, the Sun, likely to be dragged in. 

News International repeatedly lied to the English parliament about phone hacking from 2006 to the present. It put the DPP on its payroll, after he had favourably limited the scoper of prosecutions in 2006. With News International's lies so brutally exposed, parliament faced a public challenge to its preeminent authority that could not be refused without conceding utter impotence.

In Britain the Rubicon has been crossed, and MPs, even Tories, are liberating themselves from their Murdoch demons. News Limited is perceived as a criminal enterprise and it is hard to imagine the BSkyB deal going through, where a week ago it was a done deal. The possibility of James Murdoch (and maybe even Rupert) facing criminal prosecution is being canvassed. News may even be forced to divest itself of its media holdings there.

But what of Australia? Fairfax has only perfunctory coverage of the affair on their sites and the Abbott/mad 'Lord' Monckton/News Ltd carbon hysteria carries on without a beat in Murdochland. What gives with feeding the public disinformation on climate change anyway, given its gravity. Should our leaders really pander to this tycoon who is misleading the public?

Editors and journalists working for News move from rag to rag around the empire, including to Australian titles, most of which are tabloids(of course the Australian is an altogether different kind of comic-book). Issues like collusion with police, phone-hacking and the activities of private investigators have to a concern. The other big issue is the too-close relations between some politicians and News, the perception(!) of secret deals, and the manipulation of the public through propaganda. Promoting fear and barracking for the police state.

Bob Brown has now called for an inquiry into the Murdoch press, given its near monopoly status, but without Labor party support it won't happen. Abbott has all too clearly thrown in his lot with the evil empire.

Now that the Carbon Tax is announced, I hope Gillard and the Labor leadership recognise the opportunity. Will they have the courage to slay the tyrant where it was born? The moment to do so has presented itself.

UK PM 'Dave' Cameron has seriously damaged himself by his serious misjudgement in hiring Andy Coulson, and getting too close to the Murdochs, not seeing this coming despite warnings. The whole affair exploded in his face. He is exposed as either stupidly naive or contemptuous of the public. Leaders of Australian political parties should ponder this fate.

Rupert of Phone

medusa of telephones

 

Rupert Murdoch appears from a smokestack to gaze approvingly on his medusa, Rebecca Brooks

democracy: the simulation

 

Greece, founder of democracy, land of the golden mean. Parliament has not much of the former, none of the latter. The building owes more to Louis XIV than the Parthenon, a palace of executive fiat for a provincial satrap built with the methods and materials of brutalism. The PM is the simulacrum of a Greek PM, he's got the right name, the very image of a modern social democrat, but he's a creature of Harvard and Wall St, and probably thinks he's doing the right thing: "painful but necessary decisions". What he believes to be thought is propaganda: couldn't imagine his way out of a paper bag. But if he had clear directions ...

This parliament's Greek, so the shyster architect put columns on the facade, but the ratios that give ancient Greek architecture its beauty and harmony are nowhere to be seen. A crude and unconvincing fake. This is appropriate enough for a 'democratic' apparatus that uses its citizens to satisfy a corrupt global financial system, and mirrors the ugly but stupid thinking of unelected hedge fund plutocrats, who can't create a thing of beauty, even for themselves.

Don't laugh however at Greece's expense. Greece is just the first to fall. US Warmongers on credit(3 trillion in the hole, and still digging)are plotting to steal the savings of all their allies, and their own people's. It's not theft however, it's a higher calling. Why waste money on farm animals? The war machine is too big to fail.

Thumbs down, or, DIY death squad

Democracy, Murdoch style. Thumbs down for the vanquished

The crowd wait for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, primed for hate. A banker who rapes maids. But the maid seems to have been paid $US 100,000 to make her complaint, by a deniable(for the real hand behind these charges) drug-dealer.

[LIPsky pic here]

Waiting in the wings, John Lipsky, the American deputy of the IMF stood ready to do the work of the hedge funds, and return to the IMF's (discredited) usual line on structural adjustment, which Strauss-Kahn had begun to distance the institution from. Endebted states must take more loans(at usurious rates), and pauperize their citizens for the benefit of hedge funds who speculate in bonds and bank debt, and, not coincidentally, massaged the European sovereign debt problem to precipitate an uncontrolled crisis. Speculators make money from volatility and fear.

In collusion with them, the ratings agencies(also discredited) demand that taxpayers(ie not the rich, who don't do tax), crystallise the 'profits' of these anti-democratic stooges. Actually, these funds made a dumb investment, and should lose their shirts(and trousers too, if that's what it takes), rather than cry poor and steal money from the people.

These same 'volk' have invested bigtime in the prison-industrial complex. That's their bed. They sponsor media that rails against 'softness on crime'. Let them(and those corrupt political and institutional leaders who facilitated the scam) be remanded in custody, tried, and if guilty, locked in it. Theft is a crime, or? They're not too big to gaol.