Tag: Murdoch

Australia, Retirement

Rupert Murdoch’s ‘quiet retirement’

Rupert Murdoch will be 84 years old at his next birthday next March, but the old curmudgeon shows no signs that he wants to stop working and enjoy a quiet retirement.

But then, I am the same, if only a year and a half younger than he is. I want to keep going, too.

So I do have some understanding of the guy I knew so intimately half a century ago. The younger Rupert was, even then, a classic case of narcissistic nepotism — a condition usually reserved for dictators and conquerers.

There was an ancient Gaelic word for Murdoch: Mur (the sea) and Doch (invaders).

He was also good fun for a while when he needed you. But you knew the day would come when he didn’t need you.

His best friends at school, university and at the gambling tables in the Riviera all learned that. To know him was to soon recognise he was someone who believed himself be well above the ordinary earthling.

And Rupert was to prove it.

We are recognising today that the Islamic wars now raging in Syria, Iraq, Libya and their neighbouring countries have their origins in the earlier Iraq war, in which Rupert Murdoch was a secret but powerful influence.

The Iraq invasion was the consequence of decisions made by John Howard, Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Having been fed information that turned out to be totally wrong, they nevertheless manipulated the United Nations to support an invasion and Murdoch was standing behind them. The misleading and untrue headlines that followed were the height of his whole career and his influence on politicians.

The newspaper archives of those events still show that Rupert Murdoch was just as involved as the political leaders.

One could overlook many things that Rupert Murdoch did in his life, but the Iraq war will always haunt his reputation. No other newspaper proprietor in history can claim to have started a major war — except perhaps William Randolph Hearst.

In America, Rupert seems now to be seeking a kind of redemption.

Dishonoured in Britain for many reasons, including the nasty hacking business, at which he encouraged his staff to become expert peeping toms and nasty vilifiers of innocent celebrities, from royalty downwards.

There was something in his mentality that made him see everyone else as evil and only he totally blameless.

His visits to the UK now are strictly in-and-out as quick as you can. Equally short visits to his homeland Australia encourages the same kind of skullduggery that is now the signature style of his crumbling newspaper empire.

In America, where he seems now to have settled, he is clearly trying to promote his identity, which has never been as great there as in Britain and Australia. He wants to be a major player in a country that is loaded with major players in every aspect of life.

A real estate agent in New York’s Central Park area is advertising high-rise apartments with a message:

The higher the tower, the more each multimillion dollar apartment is worth.

Rupert is busy now trying to build a greater recognition of his brilliance in a country that has never paid him much attention before. Billionaires and posturers are thick on the ground. Every day, he attends every function hoping to be the prime centre of attraction.

He is playing a double game in U.S. politics.

A fervent Republican for many years, he is still courting Democrat heroes — mainly Bill and Hillary Clinton, while hanging out with some of the more prominent members of his own party. Hillary has been coy about the presidency, but there is no doubt she is a significant possible replacement for Obama next year.

Rupert often appears alone at the various functions he attends, but always in  the background is a retinue of two armed bodyguards, a permanent doctor and nurse, some of his currently favoured employees and one of his sons.

Adding to his image are a series of modern playthings ‒ like the Amazon four-propeller drone he takes to one of the Californian beaches to learn how to fly it, happy to be photographed with it.

He has no plans to slow down any time soon. He will, no doubt, be continuing to formulate his plans for the world.

We can only wonder: does he have in store for Australia next?

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Opportunity gap, wealth gap

Will Murdoch’s great unwashed youths rise up? Left in Team Australia’s dust

Left in Team Australia's dust

Even Rupert Murdoch can sense a broad feeling of unrest and deep dislocated disturbance for a generation left in Team Australia’s dust.

By ABC’s Jonathan Green

Rupert Murdoch’s warning of the “inevitable social and political upheavals to come” might very well be spawned from the masses of underemployed youth who are left in Team Australia’s dust, writes Jonathan Green.

His somewhat counterintuitive observations on growing income inequality may have taken the headlines, but what exactly might Rupert Murdoch have had in mind when he spoke of the “inevitable social and political upheavals to come”?

A telling line there from his speech to G20 finance ministers, a reflection on the possible consequences of a generation of young people, from bereft and penniless pockets across the affluent West, left without jobs, prospects, hope or connection.

Whatever mayhem is in store will no doubt be grist for the inflated daily misanthropies of his tabloid press, so there’s a positive, but Murdoch seems genuinely alert to a deepening social divide and the gathering dysfunction that straddles it.

As Paul Kelly wrote in The Australian, reporting his proprietor’s address:

The lack of opportunity for the next generation was “especially troubling” along with the “inevitable social and political upheavals to come”. This was because the unemployment rate for people under 25 years in the US was 13 per cent and in the Eurozone was 23 per cent. It was twice as high in Spain and Greece and parts of France and Italy.

And here?

The Brotherhood of St Laurence crunched the numbers in early September.

It found that 15 per cent of Australian 15-24-year-olds were underemployed: they had some work, but not as much as they either wanted or needed. The rate was the highest it has been since 1978, when the Australian Bureau of Statistics began compiling numbers around youth underemployment.

And actual joblessness? Among the 15-24-year-olds the rate is rattling pretty stubbornly at about the same level of 15 per cent. Combine the two, and according to the Brotherhood, “more than 580,000 young Australians are now either underemployed or unemployed. Overall, this represents more than a quarter of 15 to 24-year-olds in the labour market.”

According to the Government, this is an issue of industry and motivation. While they might dream of “lifting” the young un and underemployed are presumably “leaning” for the moment.

Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews may have ruled out drug testing them, but still wants them to work harder for their meagre unemployment benefit, a rate of benefit they won’t be able to access in full until the age of 25; never mind the six month wait for benefits and job search diaries that will fill libraries.

According to Treasurer Joe Hockey, “We need people under the age of 30 to earn or learn.”

“There isn’t a crisis,” says Education Minister Christopher Pyne.

Try fruit picking, says Employment Minister Eric Abetz:

There is no right to demand from your fellow Australians that just because you don’t want to do a bread delivery or a taxi run or a stint as a farmhand that you should therefore be able to rely on your fellow Australian to subsidise you.

Meanwhile, there are 580,000 young Australians with no good reason to get up in the morning.

They’re across the country, in regional centres stripped of life and purpose, in outer suburban sweeps detached from the jobs, infrastructure and resource lifeblood of the cities of which they are only nominally a part.

Is it here, in the great boondocks of welfare dependent apathy and creeping disdain that Mr Murdoch’s “inevitable social and political upheavals” will arise?

Will it be among a growing and increasingly hopeless underclass, a quarter of our young population who lack even the humdrum social connection of work, never mind an instinctive affinity with Team Australia.

The outcome? Some will turn to drugs. Some to crime. Some to simple indolence. Some will struggle desperately against a conspiracy of circumstances. Some will succeed. Some will be radicalised, their heads filled with talk of jihad and visions of violent glory.

National security legislation whistles through the parliament, unspecified foreign destinations are proscribed, the capacity of the media to reflect on the operations of our secret police is constrained … all of it deemed essential to subdue the threat of terror, particularly the challenge of the “lone wolf”.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars are pulled from GP-based mental health programs. Program funding in youth psychosis services is cut or uncertain, the entire provision of mental health is a place of policy limbo pending review.

And what do we know about the most recent lone wolf, the man who ran amok in the Canadian parliament? That his actions were as likely the result of drug and mental health issues as radical Islam.

We’ve been asked to take the parallel to heart.

Stopping radicalised young Australians from boarding whatever flight it may be that runs direct to Damascus is one thing, nipping the deep social roots of radicalisation and disturbance is another.

It may be that these men act out their violence not because, as is so often argued, they hate the things we are … it could be because those things “we are” are applied with such inequality, or in some places not at all.

The result will be illness, anger, despair and perhaps jihad … but it might also be a broader sense of unrest and deep dislocated disturbance for a generation left in Team Australia’s dust.

Even Rupert Murdoch can see that.

Khemlani

Gough Whitlam and the Rupert Murdoch memory hole. For Bolt’s Never to be seen Archive by a senior Exec of News Corp

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With Gough Whitlam’s legacy now being reconsidered and debated, one thing the Australian media are not prepared to discuss is the role of Rupert Murdoch in his dismissal, writes Rodney E. Lever.

WITH THE SAD PASSING of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam this week, it is interesting to recall how his illustrious record has been besmirched and distorted over the years – even in recent years – and how certain elements involved in his dismissal have been removed from view — and placed down the memory hole.

Last year, for instance, I saw the two episodes of the ABC’s documentary about the Whitlam era, called Whitlam: the Power and the Passion.

Having been closely involved at that time, I was amazed at Australia’s national broadcaster’s either incompetence or deliberate burying of the truth.

The ABC reeled out all the false allegations thrown at the Whitlam Government by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers at the time, with no evidence whatsoever to back them up. It simply repeated ugly and untrue stories from The Australian — stories that have been since been shown to be contrived, exaggerated and false.

Did they mention that John Howard was one of the busy bee Liberals who secretly brought Khemlani to Australia and took him to a Canberra hotel with his two suitcases of records of supposed dealings with the Whitlam Government. After long days and nights sifting through the papers, Howard and his colleagues found nothing – absolutely nothing – which could be held detrimentally against Whitlam and his government?

No. There was no mention of that. Nor have I seen any mention of this in the welter of articles about Whitlam and his dismissal this week.

This is just one part of the concerted misinformation campaign carried out by the Murdoch press at the behest of a furious, jilted, Rupert Murdoch in 1975.

In 1975, Rupert Murdoch came back from England, where he had just purchased The News of the World. He came expressly to destroy a government which, three years earlier, he had helped to elect.

Murdoch had hated Menzies. He also hated McMahon, who was in the pocket of the Packers.

He campaigned for Whitlam in 1972, with all the emerging power of his newspapers and expected rewards in return.

From Whitlam, he got nothing back, not even condescension, for Whitlam certainly had at least the same level of personal ego as Rupert Murdoch — perhaps even more.

Miffed by Whitlam’s failure to reward him for his support in the election and Whitlam’s failure to accept the Murdoch view on how to run the country, Rupert began his ugly, ruthless campaign to bring Whitlam down. It was the most savage attack on an elected government in the history of this country — with the possible exception of the attacks on Julia Gillard and Labor’s reforms in the last term of Parliament.

Joan Evatt recalls this vicious propaganda campaign:

In the early stages of the campaign, there had been criticisms from highly regarded journalists about their copy being so altered that their stories bore no resemblance to articles that had been filed. Placement was pushed back, headlines were deemed by them as scurrilous and not reflective of the content, and so the outraged allegations of not just media bias, but direct editorial interference, precipitated a strike of journalists.

Denis Cryle in a 2008 book outlined journalists’ complaints:

…the deliberate and careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation, political censorship and, more occasionally, distortion of copy from senior specialist journalists, the political management of news and features, the stifling of dissident and even palatably impartial opinion in the papers’ columns…

In the Murdoch Papers, Dr Martin Hirst detailed some firsthand accounts of the overt anti-Whitlam pro-Liberal bias of the Murdoch press, including by former Murdoch employee Alan Yates:

Alan Yates was a third-year cadet on the Daily Mirror and recalls the dismissal ‘shocked the entire newsroom’. Yates was on the AJA House Committee and says that while Murdoch was not necessarily in the newsroom, ‘his editors and his chiefs of staff were certainly involved in day-to-day selection of editorial content’. Alan Yates has said that he felt powerless as a ‘junior reporter’, but remembered his copy being altered to favour the Liberal Party’s viewpoint:

‘When questioning the chiefs of staff and chief sub-editor about this I was clearly told that that was the editorial line, the editorial people had thought that it was a stronger angle. Therefore I was left not too many options to go.’

Murdoch’s journalists rebelled at the vicious campaign and many resigned from the company in disgust

Alas, I was not among them. I was the senior executive of News Corp in Queensland and the lone breadwinner for my family and the father of six children, all at a critical stage of their education. I felt unable to walk away from my job so easily as some of the other journalists. But the events of those days brought me to consider resignation at a more appropriate time.

The mainstream media, by ignoring this sad episode, are touching up historical events to make them more palatable to certain current actors — specifically Rupert Murdoch. By doing so, they tarnish the Whitlam legacy and mislead the Australian people.

In effect, the mainstream media are sending Rupert Murdoch’s – and its own – role in the premature downfall of Gough Whitlam down Australia’s growing memory hole, thereby doing the Australian people a manifest disservice.

Australian Economy Deregulation, Budget, Joe Hockey, Matt Corman

30% of our largest companies pay less than.10c in the dollar corporate tax. We have a revenue problem not a spending problem

Global crackdown on tax havens fails to sway Australian companies

There would be no deficit Mr Hockey. If you collected what Mr Murdoch and others have been allowed to forego: Murdoch alone $1.5billion.

How is it that I paid 35% income tax and 30% company tax throughout my working life and the largest companies pay less than 10% and you call them lifters.?????

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Australia's Shame, Media, Security, Uncategorized

Abbott’s let the dogs out and 3 families suffer

 

Be Alert, Be Very, Very Alert! The Person Next To May Have An iPhone.

  • September 24, 2014
  • Written by:
  • paraphrased

 

Last night a man was shot by police. A policeman is in hospital with serious wounds. These events are tragic. The man is alleged to have made threats against the Prime Minister (who is currently out of the country). Whether these involved a knife or a chaff bag is unclear at this stage.

It just strikes me as inconsistent that we can dismiss a threat to one prime minister as just being “a figure of speech”, but another will be used by many people as justification for a range of measures. And yes, it  has resulted in a violent altercation.

A few days ago, the terrorist threat was raised to high, but we were told that there was no particular threat.

Then we had the raids. Which we were told had been part of an investigation which had been going on for months. And that an attack would have been carried out within days.

We’re told that the PM and Parliament are a potential target for threats.  this always been the case?  John Howard wore the bullet proof vest when speaking to good, old responsible Aussie gun owners.

Tony Abbott tells us a few days later that all that’s needed for an attack is “a knife, an iPhone and a victim”, but he adds:

“Terrorists want to scare us out of being ourselves and our best response is to insouciantly be fully Australian, to defy the terrorists by going about our normal business,” he told reporters in Sydney.

Abbott went on to tell us that orders to carry out demonstration executions had been sent to the the “small networks” of followers in Australia and other countries.

So, lets make sure that those “small networks” didn’t miss the orders by broadcasting them on the nightly news. Let’s tell everyone that how easy it is to become a terrorist – all you need is “a knife, an iPhone and a victim”

Then say that you need to be “fully Australian”  and just say “She’ll be right, mate” and go off to work.

Videos posted by ISIL stays there and nobody takes it down. Some sort of perverse respect for freedom of speech?

Yet the Murdoch media can completely ignore hundreds of thousands (world-wide) marching on climate change, but find it worth writing stories about less than a hundred protesting the building of a mosque.

 

Uncategorized

News Corp is Murdoch’s Australian Tweet

 

 

 

We have seen the collective power of News Corp in action when the Daily Telegraph,The Herald Sun  The Courier Mail and Australian set out to get Rudd and do it for Tony. Akerman, Bolt, Albrechtsen & Devine  in their collective portrait of Kevin did not find skerrick of human quality. They were coupled with  headlines of a quality never seen before. Abbott on the other hand was raised to the equivalent of sainthood by these arseholes who claim  independence of thought and freedom of expression.

Now we are told that these print media outlets are all hemorrhaging cash and are being supported by News Corp’s online real estate site and Foxtel entertainment. That they certainly aren’t fulfilling Murdoch’s commercial agenda but are at the top of their game when it came to his political one.

  “The truth is sad and salutary. News Corp’s domination of the press is a threat to Australia’s democracy. There is now no politically realistic way to overcome this problem.

“The effective control of the media is the first step on the road to controlling the values and future direction of our society.”……Robert Mann

How is 66% control going to be wrested from Murdoch? His personal agenda is the sale or neutering of the ABC & SBS and total destruction of Fairfax his only commercial competition which like all print media is also struggling financially. Most of the multitude of alternative blogs and websites are seen by only a tiny fraction of the population. In societies like ours, newspapers should be the most important news agenda-setters and as much as we don’t like it News Corp dominates without news. Their papers tend to be 25% information and 70% Murdoch commentary. In other words the majority that passes as news in their papers is actually propaganda.

Mr Murdoch’s newspapers always respond in unison – as with  some divine wind –  they pursue their relentless campaigns in favour of current Murdoch objectives – particularly his political ones. Every journalist in Australia knows that.

“It is the saddest reflection imaginable on this society that virtually no one in public life has dared to speak out against the growing concentration of ownership of the Australian press. As a consequence  Australia now has a concentration of newspaper ownership unknown anywhere in the developed world beyond the party-controlled papers of the communist bloc.”

In the USA when he couldn’t takeover CNN so he established Fox News a 24-hour conservative-populist propaganda channel, where right-wing opinion and slanted news, described in totalitarian fashion as “fair and balanced”, was delivered in a highly entertaining fashion. Fox amplifies the anxiety and prejudices of conservative America. Fox News is the voice of the Republican America.

  “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us. Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” With Fox News, Murdoch’s two great passions – media and right-wing politics – have come together in perfect harmony.

The past decade has seen the unification of his tabloids partly to cut costs but bringing together a single political voice of right-wing provoking columnists who work for him and follow his line.

Today’s papers echo the Alarmist cry of Abbott telling us that James Foley’s  beheading could happen here.

“This is not something that happens elsewhere. It could happen in  a country like Australia if we relax our vigilance against terrorism”….Tony Abbott

Abbott is telling Australian Muslims how they should behave to be part of Team Australia rather than listen.  When Bolt and Blair make it a regular exercise to incite anti-Islamic attitude to show they don’t belong they are inviting radicalisation. Size of an event doesn’t matter just as long as it makes front page across Australia. They want a killer punch. Like ISIS  they are Murdoch’s terror mongers and want to provoke, create a disturbance here.  Margaret Thatcher had a very wise policy on terrorism – that if you really wish to protect citizens, you do so by discouraging media coverage of it. “Media coverage is the oxygen of terrorism”, observed Thatcher. If politicians act irresponsibly and feed media with national security fears, they can actually incite race hate, violence and extreme acts. Therefore, the only time a government would play this card is when it is itself under threat and Tony Abbott is feeling just that. Think about it if somebody was murdered here in Melbourne or Sydney in seemingly terrorist act who would stand to gain?

The opposition is however behind the 8 ball as it has no voice. Abbott is trying to neuter the ABC and SBS not because they have a left bias but because they offer multiple views. That alone next to Murdoch’s tabloids makes them appear to have an opposition voice.  Fairfax attempts to be 60% news and 25% opinion and are also accused of being of the left. However they are in as much as they are providing  information and are  not just Murdoch’s propaganda flier.