What’s it like to be the subject of News Corp coverage?
I was and always will be exploitation material in the eyes of the Murdoch press.
Source: National Times – A detailed and confronting article about NewsCorp… | Facebook
Category: Informed Comment
All the hyperbole about Pezzullo’s fall from grace is annoying.
Everything Pezzullo oversaw on Manus and Nauru was actually worse than all the insider grandstanding, the attacks on public service neutrality, the enabling of lobbyists, the damage to democracy, the filthy deals. He oversaw actual torture, restrictive practices, medical neglect, human despair, denial of access to lawyers, bashings, extreme corruption, abuse of youth.
The neutrality of the public service has always been a myth. But brutalising refugees is a very obvious low. Devastating more than 2000 lives is significant.
Media have been far too gentle with the Home Affairs culture for way too long.
Address that by all means, but also give the legacy caseload of refugees permanency now.
Source: Manus, Nauru way worse than Pezzullo texts – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Remember tax evasion and the Pandora Papers or was that the Paradise Papers? Where the fuck did that go? Glen Wheatly put his hand up and confessed. They threw him into jail and we were done with it. The Caymans simply laughed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_Papers
Waffle, fastidious yet unadulterated waffle. This is the day of the PwC whitewash. Michael West reports on two cover-ups, that of PwC and PwC Global.
The Accountants of Fortune at PwC hired Ziggy Switkowski to conduct an ‘independent’ review into the governance of the Big 4 firm. Nobody knows better than PwC that you don’t commission an ‘independent expert report’ if you don’t know what it’s going to say. And so it is that Ziggy has delivered a humbling admonishment spectacularly lacking in evidence of any wrong-doing, but long on motherhood statements.
Source: Ziggy plays for time: PwC’s dual ‘independent reports’ a dual whitewash – Michael West
Of course, there were a number of articles this morning about what a shocking job he’d done and how the voters were just idiots who didn’t know how oppressed they were. Phil Coorey who is best remembered for his article on how Gladys saved Australia wrote in this morning’s Financial Review that his government came “stone motherless last on every metric in terms of handling the pandemic”. Interesting that the paper he writes for was also critical of Mark McGowan for closing off his state and streeting the rest of Australia in every metric and lost very few people to Covid meaning that he can’t be accused of being stone motherless last. Surprisingly, Coorey was terribly impressed with Gladys in spite of the Ruby Princess, the untested chauffeur setting off a wave and various other things that one would have thought rivalled any alleged mistakes that Andrews made.
As Steve Bannon said: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real enemy is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Next time Peter Dutton announces on Sunday that he’ll hold another referendum if elected, only to say that he won’t on Thursday, or Dan Tehan tells us that Albanese should call off the referendum (which can’t happen without the approval of Parliament which won’t sit before the vote), then ask yourself if they haven’t decided to take Bannon’s advice.
Source: Dictator Dan Quits And Victoria Is Free… – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Government spending on Indigenous services has been exaggerated, with the reality painting a harsh picture of how Australia treats its First Peoples, writes Gerry Georgatos.
Source: Lies and myths continue of ‘over-funded’ Indigenous services
While Rupert Murdoch has announced his stepping down as the head of News Corp, his empire still continues to be a blight on journalism, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
Source: The ‘anger-tainer’ steps down: Rupert Murdoch’s non-retirement
In his landmark book The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills argues that social scientists (and educators) have an obligation to address the question of truth and its political meaning during a time of widely communicated nonsense. He further argues that in addition to a politics of truth, social scientists have to support the values of reason and human freedom. He also believed that the role of social scientists was to disturb, bear witness, and resist systems of oppression. In this view, intellectuals have to have a deep sense of commitment and civic courage while “writing with vigor and clarity for the general reader [in order] to sustain the idea and the hope of a public culture.”[1] These principles, in the age of emerging fascism, are under attack in the age of gangster capitalism by a horde of anti-public intellectuals and far-right members of the GOP.
How is it for these wanna-be fascists to be normalised when they once lurked in the shadows?
Nazis, what? Wagga independent jettisons alt-right staffer
By Steph Preston | Sep 25, 2023
A man at the centre of an infamous alt-right push to take over the NSW Young Nationals in 2018 has been unceremoniously dumped from the office of the first ever independent MP for Wagga Wagga, after Michael West Media informed him he had unwittingly hired an extremist.
Source: Michael West Media – investigative journalists – always independent
Personally, I always wondered why Peter Dutton our one-time Home Affairs/Immigration Minister always bowed to Pezullo when being asked questions about his Ministry. It seemed that Pezzulo was in fact the Minister.
The Home Affairs boss has stood aside while investigators look into whether he flouted the public service code of conduct or shared inside information improperly.
In the latest revelations, a series of text messages show that Pezzullo sought to convince political leaders to introduce a system of “D-Notices” to allow government agencies to pressure media organisations not to publish stories deemed damaging to national security.
Pezzullo pursued the issue after his anger was stoked by a report by then-News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst – who is now state politics editor for The Age – about his secret proposal to allow the nation’s external intelligence agency to spy on Australians.
In other messages, Pezzullo wrote that the government could “criminalise” journalists in certain circumstances for reporting on what they were told by government whistleblowers.
Source: Mike Pezzullo stands aside as Home Affairs secretary
Yet another revelation on how Trump went about servicing the world without providing even the minimum of service.
A recent analysis by the German nonprofit Urgewald estimated that the World Bank spent nearly $4 billion on fossil fuel financing last year, when it was under the leadership of a climate denier nominated by former U.S. President Donald Trump.
He has damaged democracy and civil discourse and journalism itself. The behaviour of News Corp has on occasions been reprehensible, for which I think Rupert must take the blame.
Source: Why is Rupert Murdoch stepping aside now and what does it mean for the company?
Here are three essential reads from The Conversation about Murdoch and Fox News and how they have shaped the American media and political landscapes.
Whatever the changes, A.J. Bauer is surely right in quashing any assumptions that Fox News “would suddenly become a bastion of journalistic integrity.” The rot, its dank and enervating properties, has well and truly set in, blighting journalism in toto and subordinating political classes too afraid to admit otherwise.
Rupert Murdoch has announced that he is becoming ‘Chairman Emeritus’ of News Corp and Fox Corporation, leaving his previous co-chair, favoured son Lachlan Murdoch, to be in charge of both, all by himself. What’s the scam?
Source: Stepping down? Will Chairman Emiritus Ruper Murdoch still pull the strings? – Michael West
My thought for the day
We dislike and resist change in the foolish assumption that we can make permanent that makes us feel secure. Yet change is part of the very fabric of our existence. (John Lord )
Source: The ALP is best prepared to take us into the future – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Across a 70-year career as the head of News Corporation – a non-state political actor and conservative social engineering project disguised as a news media company – Murdoch has innovated, refined and perfected methods of inflicting misery and dulling minds all across the Western world, at great distance from his physical, shrivelled shell. If the world’s information flows like a stream, Rupert Murdoch has for seven decades been a strain of E. Coli tainting the waters.
Source: Fuck Rupert Murdoch – The Shot
Indigenous Australians are as divided by income and wealth as any group in Australia however, the fact is 1 in 2 First Nation Peoples live far, far, below the poverty line, which isn’t the case for Australians as a whole. They are represented as the lowest on every social metric. Price and Mundine are regarded as “coconuts” or “plastic “Koories” and not real Indigenous Australians as they aren’t part of the majority or 70% nor do they accept the generation after generation of social trauma and the consequences passed down by colonialism that haven’t been resolved for 250 years. The fact, that Indigenous Australians weren’t even recognized as full citizens until 1969. And they still remain under the administration of an Aboriginal Affairs Department whose promises budgets, plans, and strategies have changed like the weather with minimal success.
Yes23 is a simple request to be listened to with the hope of more self-administration of social welfare and other issues decided “in the communities” by being allowed some input by the First Nation peoples themselves. To be allowed the self-respect that was never allowed to grow and develop.
Stan Grant Adam Goodes, Jacinta Price, and Warren Mundine might all be part of the middle-class professional minority but they too are divided in who they are speaking for. As are Noel Pearson Marcia Langton and Lidia Thorpe. The Upper class Indigenous are as politically divided as white people are but their divisions are better resolved among the First Nations Peoples themselves than the Colonial political system imposed on them by the white fella that’s failed them until now. The Voice and/or Treaty might reveal the complexity and political division among Indigenous Australians but The Uluru Statement and process that resulted in the request for a Voice is the majority and result of by Indigenous Australians themselves. That year of effort put in was dismissed by the Turnbull LNP without discussion politically pushed by Dutton’s far-right “Monkey Pod Room”, a far-right minority of Liberals and the National Party. Those who believe in ignoring and denying the reality and historical facts of colonialism and the reality of better outcomes of a Voice for Indigeneity given by most other Nations on the planet.
The ‘disinformation’ (read: lies and bullshit) being propagated about the indigenous Voice to Parliament by the Murdoch media, among others, harms our society. It promotes division, celebrates and cultivates ignorance and bigotry, oppresses a minority and diminishes us all. Why do we tolerate such behaviour?
Source: Freedom of the press barons? – Pearls and Irritations
Imagine if the question we will all be asked at the referendum on 14 October was being asked just about you: Would you want to be consulted before decisions were made about your future?
The pendulum, it would seem, is again swinging away from the left. The shadow cast by the legacy of the military junta has grown thicker. As it does so, the Pinochet defenders, beneficiaries of economic policies that were prosecuted alongside murderous ones against critics, remain noisy and grotesquely at large.
Source: Brief for Murder: Pinochet’s Apologists Five Decades On – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Andrew Bolt “Country Boy” once bragged how he had a “bestie” Aboriginal friend at school. I’m not sure but Alan might have been his name. Anyway, its obviously unimportant because, he certainly doesn’t give a shit about him now. ” It must now be crushed: Andrew Bolt says Voice to Parliament is ‘dead’ but a narrow defeat would be a ‘disaster'( Andrew Bolt)
So I’m voting Yes for Jake. And the tens of thousands like him.
Source: I’m doing it for Jake – » The Australian Independent Media Network
This is a story of what a voice can achieve and how easily it is undone by external forces.
The indigenous voice has always been there, sometimes weak, sometimes strong, but rarely listened to for any length of time. Australia has a sad record of taking indigenous programs that work, and defunding them. The Canberra and NT bureaucracy, despite their best intentions, simply do not listen, or provide funding certainty, to the multiple voices that are already in place in health, education, alcohol and domestic violence management. Or they are constrained in what they can do by a raft of ‘white tape’ like Sydney design and environmental planning standards for a family home to suit 3.5 residents instead of 10 to 15.
Source: Smothered indigenous voices – Pearls and Irritations
Justice Kelly Rees issued an arrest warrant, 2 years ago, for journalist Shane Dowling (me) to serve 10 months jail for contempt of court on the instructions of Kerry Strokes’ Channel Seven and its parent company Seven West Media. The arrest warrant was issued at the Supreme Court of NSW on the 3rd of September 2021.
The fullest acknowledgment of humanity is to say, I see you and I hear you.
Contrary to the constant refrain of the No campaign, this referendum has not divided us. We were already divided. What it has done is exaggerate gaps and fissures that already existed.
If we vote No on October 14, it will not suddenly reveal Australia as a deeply racist nation – all it will do is prove it.
Source: Voiceless – The Shot
A choice to accept what is or move forward as a nation and address the gaps for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. To those who reason, it is not unreasonable. To do this, they simply ask for a say in matters that affect them. A small request.
The Voice will create practical and lasting change.
To refuse these simple requests would dishonour our First Nations people and declare our racism.
Source: A legacy of racism with a grief that lingers on – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Bad enough that Trump praised Putin during Trump’s presidency. To grant Putin any moral authority now on the subject of political repression is further evidence of Trump’s sympathies for, if not complicity in, an authoritarian axis.
From the dodgy politician getting a mining license against the wishes of landowners, to the multimillion-dollar government IT contract awarded to a company belonging to a friend of a federal minister. Corruption is rarely visible but its impacts are felt by every Australian, Clancy Moore reports.
Source: The invisible hand of ‘legal’ corruption costs every Australian – Michael West
The moral here from the US military-industrial complex is: stay the course. The returns are worth it. And in such a calculus, concepts such as freedom and democracy can be commodified and budgeted. As for Ukrainian suffering? Well, let it continue.
Moving from Enlightenment 1 to Enlightenment 2 with only a soft glow of understanding will take courage. Do we have it? In terms of change, the new Enlightenment of artificial intelligence will make the old seem placid by comparison.
If free speech’s only purpose is to denigrate, insult and humiliate, then we need to reappraise its purpose. Some say it identifies those perpetrating wrongdoing, but if it creates more evil than good, it’s a strange freedom for a so-called enlightened society to bequeath its citizens.
In March of 2016 the renowned Australian journalist and filmmaker John Pilger published an article titled “A world war has begun. Break the silence.” which urgently warned of the U.S. empire’s aggressive escalations against Russia and China. Re-reading parts of it in 2023 is like watching someone placing flags next to recently planted seeds that would eventually grow into the towering problems our world now faces.
But whatever it says it aims to be, No Labels will help Trump.
But if a third-party candidate takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House.
Source: No Labels, No Fables, No Third-Party Betrayals | The Smirking Chimp
Unintended consequences
Paul Keating envisaged a superannuation system which funded the aged in retirement. It has turned into a giant tax shelter where wealth is captured and passed on to descendants, and where falling home ownership was not factored in. Harry Chemay reports.
Source: Falling home ownership: the elephant in the superannuation retirement room – Michael West
Ambrose Bierce, whose cynicism supplies a hygienic cold wash, suggested that politics was always a matter of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. It involved conducting public affairs for private advantage. How right he was. One way of justifying such an effort is through using such words as the “national interest” or “public interest” in justifying government policies, from the erroneous to the criminal. They become weasel-like terms, soiling and spoiling language.
There is nothing to suggest that more flights will automatically reduce prices per se. As Karl Marx documents with expansive brilliance, markets tend towards concentration. In time, companies, much in the manner of hoodlums carving up neighbourhoods for their drugs trade, will divvy up their share and keep prices lucratively high. Miserable customers make for happy shareholders.
Corporate capitalism, defined by the cult of the self and the ruthless exploitation of the natural world and all forms of life for profit, thrives on the fostering of chronic psychological and physical disorders. The diseases and pathologies of despair — alienation, high blood pressure, diabetes, anxiety, depression, morbid obesity, mass shootings (now almost two per day on average), domestic and sexual violence, drug overdoses (over 100,000 per year) and suicide (49,000 deaths in 2022) — are the consequences of a deeply traumatized society.
Source: Chris Hedges: Our Collective Trauma is the Road to Tyranny – scheerpost.com
Hatred and violence are surging across the United States as the former president lashes out at judges and prosecutors, reports Alan Austin.
Source: Facing life in prison, Donald Trump fuels racial violence in the USA
The BRICS partnership now encompasses 47.3 percent of the world’s population, with a combined global Gross Domestic Product — by purchasing power parity, or PPP — of 36.4 percent.
In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) account for merely 10 percent of the world’s population, their share of the global GDP — by PPP — is 30.4 percent.
My thought for the day
Will we ever grow intellectually to the point where we can discern and understand the potential for the good within us? ( John Lord )
Source: The Times they are a Changing – » The Australian Independent Media Network
No campaign advocates for peddling “myths and misinformation” about the looming referendum.
Source: “A… – The Fiberal Party of Australia – Lies & Misdemeanours | Facebook
If your business relies on ripping off staff, taxpayers and other assorted bystanders – or needs to prevent public access to affordable life-saving medication – in order to stay afloat, it should just close down, writes managing editor Michelle Pini.
Remember everyone The Coalition tried to ensure you don’t get cheaper prescriptions … because the Pharmacy Guild are big Liberal donors (Dave Smith )
Source: Old, sick or dead? You still need to come and see the chemist
Sam Roggeveen’s basic storyline in The Echidna Strategy – that the China threat is grossly exaggerated, and that Australia should not, and need not, rely on America for our security protection – is causing predictable conniptions in our securitat, commentariat and political class. But his argument is compelling. It can be challenged and refined and contested in parts, but we ignore it at our peril.
Source: A compelling voice for rethinking Australia’s national security – Pearls and Irritations
IPA would make that the BIG 5 advisors. Add News Corp and you will find the BIG 6. Or were they LNP Lobbyists friends with benefits?
Australia’s original Big 4 ‘whistleblower’ George Rozvany called for the bust up of PwC, EY, KPMG and Deloitte in these pages eight years ago. These “unregulated private partnerships” have cost Australia dearly.
Source: George Rozvany: living in the shadows of the Big 4 and the art of sudden reappearance – Michael West
In Australia, where the spirit of roguish exploitation remains strong, companies such as the national carrier Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank are rolling in cash. Supermarket outlets such as Coles have also announced huge returns. To them can be added such energy companies as AGL. While households are counting the dollars and cents for the weekly shopping and the fortnightly rental, corporate entities of a certain heft are thriving.
Source: The Profiteering Motive – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Will the government finally act on money-laundering laws promised 17 years ago, or once again be thwarted by lobbyists for lawyers, accountants and property developers? With Madagascar, China and Haiti, Australia is a global laggard. Callum Foote reports.
Source: Action on money-laundering, property price relief, or plus ça change? – Michael West
What Murdoch doesn’t Report,
The International Monetary Fund reports that the nations of the globe indirectly subsidized fossil fuels, the sources of dangerous greenhouse gases causing global heating, to the tune of $7 trillion in 2022. In other words, we’re acting like we are brain dead. So report Simon Black, Ian Parry, Nate Vernon at the IMF.
PS: What happened to the teeth and the transparency?
Source: The NACC: Why it is taking so long – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The Better Money Managers
“The “entitlement calculation engine” was supposed to help Centrelink determine how much welfare recipients should be paid, based on their individual circumstances. It was one part of a much larger effort to overhaul Centrelink’s payment infrastructure.
The contract was awarded in November 2019 by the then minister for government services, Stuart Robert. The money was subsequently paid over four years in instalments of $23m, $44m, $67m and $57m.
Source: “The… – The Fiberal Party of Australia – Lies & Misdemeanours | Facebook
Australia’s funding priorities have been utterly muddled of late. At the Commonwealth level, there is cash to be found in every conceivable place to support every absurd military venture, as long as it targets those hideous authoritarians in Beijing. It seemed utterly absurd that, even as the Australian federal government announced its purchase of over 200 tomahawk cruise missiles – because that is exactly what the country needs – there are moves afoot to prune and cut projects conducted by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD).
Any argument that declares it’s unjust to teach children from the age of three Australia’s Real History is hiding the past from view. That history has been carried forward intergenerationally today for 250 years and still exists in our social psyche.
The Germans are totally aware of that poison and teach their children from the earliest age their Real History and the coming of Hitler. So why are Conservative Australians so fearful of their past?
The Dutch hid their disgrace after WW2 and falsely represented themselves as anti-Nazi heroes until 1984 when it was proved that their actual unrecorded treatment of Dutch Jews was worse than that of the Germans. That less than 20% of Dutch Jews survived the enthusiastic deportation to death camps by their countrymen.
Alsmeer gained the reputation of being the Dutch most anti-Semitic town, where its elected Mayor was hanged for crimes against the Jews and his collaboration with Hitler. Coincidently Andrew Bolt’s family originates from there, his relatives still live there and so did he when he flunked Adelaide Uni. He still loves the place but like a true conservative, he advocates and will vote NO. He also wants the disgraceful aspects of our past ignored like he does Alsmeer’s
Colonisation is not just something that occurred in the past, it continues today. It’s steadfast in its approach, and its consequences affect each and every one of us. I struggle to see how we as a nation can make any real headway towards closing the gap around urgent national issues such as deaths in custody, the over-representation of First Nation peoples in custody, suicide rates, and displaced children, while the system continues to perpetuate the legacies of colonialism.
Source: Continuation of colonisation: Reflecting on January 26 – Missing Perspectives
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