Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Media mogul Murdoch is buying a Conservative alternate universe - » The Australian Independent Media Network

Media mogul Murdoch is buying a Conservative alternate universe

July 30, 2014
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The Abbott Government is leading
Australia down America’s path on a range of social and economic issues,
and holding the reigns is Rupert Murdoch. American writer Vegasjessie
gives us an international perspective on the social damage of Murdoch’s
influence, and the ramifications this could have for Australia.

Denying the climate-change crisis and taking away people’s health
care is not what most Americans want, but the “Murdochracy” is very
persuasive to the contrary.

Pro-war, anti-humanity, pro-pollution is precisely the objective of
the conservatives who are merely puppets of Rupert Murdoch. In addition
to the undying support for the merciless bombing of Gaza by most
American media outlets, Australia’s conservative government is mirroring the sentiments of the GOP and their war-mongering media with its deferential view of the far-right Israeli government.

The impending doom the Affordable Care Act faces in its next Supreme Court battle is
extremely depressing for American Progressives who think health care is
a right, not a privilege. Funny thing, universal health care in
Australia, thanks to the Abbott government, a wholly owned subsidiary of
Rupert Murdoch, is facing a similar battle.

Murdoch argued that true morality lies in the free-market
rather than socialism because “it gives people incentives to put their
own wants and needs aside to address the wants and needs of others.”
(Abbott) praised Murdoch in his IPA speech,
itself weighty with Biblical references, the tradition of politics Tony
Abbott has embraced was clear – that of obstinacy, demagoguery, and
dogmatism. Reforms promised by Abbott during the speech included
privatizing Medibank; the state-owned private health insurer for over
three million Australians, and repealing Section 18C of the Racial
Discrimination Act.

Sound depressingly familiar?

Crazy Murdoch disciples will burn this planet alive (image via crooksandliars.com)

The idea that Americans reject equality, health care for all, or any
restraints on emissions is parroted by our media, which is very much in
danger of monopolization by Murdoch. The efforts to purchase Time-Warner will continue. To create more capital, Rupert is selling his lesser assets:
Britain’s BSkyB agreed to pay $9 billion to buy Murdoch’s pay-TV
companies in Germany and Italy. Fox is expected to use the proceeds to
fuel its pursuit of Time Warner.

The abolition of the carbon tax by Australia last week was the first
industrialized nation to take a giant step backward in the efforts to
curtail man-made climate change. As Rupert owns 70% of
the Australian media, this was easily accomplished, much to the horror
of every scientist not in the employ of the Fox empire. In America,
According to USA Today/Stanford University polling,
73 percent of Americans believe in climate change and 52 percent of
Americans say that it will be a “very serious” problem if we don’t
implement policies to reduce it (as opposed to 10 percent who say that
climate change will be “not serious at all”).

When anti-climate change legislation is presented by the Murdochracy
as an essential component to protect people’s delicate finances,
America, like Australia, is going down a dark path, all thanks to a
megalomaniacal 83 year old who won’t be around to live in the awful
world he is helping to destroy. With the track record of our Supreme
Court, it wouldn’t be surprising if “clean coal” wins a massive law suit
against those damned scientists who report on facts in the
not-too-distant future.

This article was first published on crooksandliars.com.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Murdoch and Abbott: Climate change denialist flat-earthers

Rodney E. Lever 28 July 2014, 12:00pm 21

Environment Media Politics Science

It is impossible to speak sense to committed climate change deniers like Rupert Murdoch and Tony Abbott, writes Rodney E. Lever.

THERE IS LITTLE WE CAN DO at this time about climate change deniers like Rupert Murdoch and Tony Abbott.

They are both barmy, firing off comments on issues they clearly know nothing about.

Global warming is happening and if there are people who do not accept this fact then too bad. There is little anyone can do about people who are just too dumb to spend an hour or so of their time reading the links in this paragraph, all of which set out the facts clearly and simply.

I remember speaking to one of my younger daughters one day about the world being round.

She said, precociously, pointing out the window to the sea:

“Look, it's not round. It's flat!”

Then she said:

“Anyway, if it was round all that water would fall off.”

You can’t argue with logic like that.

The word that Rupert Murdoch uses more frequently than any other is “bullshit!” He uses it several times a day.

How do you speak sense to an old man who is grappling with senility, doesn't read books, doesn’t know how to use a computer and only quotes the headlines from his own newspapers.

Tony Abbott is a different kind of creature.

I don’t know him as well as I got to know Murdoch. He claims to have had an education in theology, which always has a negative effect on reality.

Tony is our prime minister — but that doesn’t register his level of
intelligence. It is rare indeed to find any prime minister or politician
who talks sense about anything.

I recently read an article in Media Matters, in which Tony Abbott is quoted as saying global warming is “absolute crap”.

That is another way of saying “bullshit”.

In the same article, Rupert Murdoch says much the same thing.

The article continues:

'Murdoch's anti-climate change crusade in Australia certainly
mirrors his company's commitment to misinformation in America, and
highlights the dangers of having news media moguls who are dedicated to
propaganda efforts regarding pressing public policy issues. Indeed,
Murdoch's media properties in Australia have been shown repeatedly to be
wildly unfair and unbalanced when it comes to the topic of climate
change.'

What that means, more simply, is that Rupert thinks global warming is “bullshit!"

But it isn't.

And with the PM and the dictatorial owner of most of Australia's
media both deny reality and work to stop action on the most pressing
issue facing the world — Australians have a problem.

If only we could find a way to remove their influence and power and be rid of them.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Abbott's Tea Party and Australia’s true political spectrum

Cathy McQueen 16 July 2014, 10:30am 129

Politics

The Mad King and his
fool: Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire has been instrumental in
promoting the rise of the Tea Party in the U.S. as well as in installing
hard right religious extremist Tony Abbott into power.

Tony Abbott leads the world's first Tea Party Government
— something that simply does not fit into Australia's usual political
spectrum, writes Cathy McQueen.

When Opposition Leader Bill Shorten likened the Coalition Government to "Tea Party Republicans" in his May Budget Reply, he neatly encapsulated the Abbott machine.

Because Prime Minister Tony Abbott has foisted something alien and
foreign onto the Australian people — an American style lunar far right
party, actively working to undermine the Australian way of life, to
create greater inequality and an impoverished underclass.

In America, the Tea Party movement was the inevitable consequence of 30 years of politics moving gradually to the right.

The move came in increments.

It started with Ronald Reagan, who nurtured and encouraged the religious right; continued to a degree with Bill Clinton, whose domestic policies like deregulating the media were quite right of centre, and resulted in Fox News and people like Rush Limbaugh; and was completed by George W Bush, whose Presidency gifted us The War on Terror and the second Iraq War.

The election of Barack Obama was the tipping point for the far right
in the USA. They could not countenance the election of even a half-white
African American and the Tea Party was born, funded by the shady fossil
fuel billionaire climate denial funding Koch brothers.

We have had no such incremental evolution in Australia.

The far right in the form of Abbott’s Government came with few warnings, now leaving people are in shock, reeling at the assault on the Australian way of life its Budget and policies represent.

Abbott lied to get elected, of course, because if he had told the truth he would have been unelectable — Australians would have run a mile.

Aided and abetted by the right wing media, largely News Ltd and the
shock jocks, this extreme rightwing Government has been foisted upon us.

Sure Australia has a few billionaires who have an interest in
maintaining inequality for their own economic purposes, for cheap
labour, like Gina Rinehart,
and sure there is a certain percentage of fundamentalist Christians in
our population, but it is a small percentage — not like in the USA where
virtually the entire South-East and much of the Mid-West is the Bible Belt.

Australians are different.

We have always enshrined the "fair go"
as part of our social and political aspirations and we are, by and
large, a secular lot. Only about 13 per cent of us go to church
regularly for example and at the last census 22 per cent declared "no religion".

We are not naturally a far right country and so having a Government
of this persuasion does not sit comfortably with the vast majority of
Australians — even the apathetic, non-politically engaged ones, who care
more about sport than politics.

In other words, the Abbott Government is, in many ways, to borrow from former conservative PM John Howard, essentially un-Australian. That is why people are angry and demonstrating in the streets in ways we haven’t seen since the first Iraq war.

So what is Australia's natural political spectrum?

Here is my theory.

I believe it can be found if you sit the Australian Labor Party and
the Greens next to each other. The LNP has become so extreme it can no
longer be considered representative of any more than, I would guess,
around five per cent of our population.

The dominant right of the ALP is fundamentally conservative and, in
my estimation, about as far right as most Australians want to go. Its
members are conservative economically, and also in the realms of health,
education, and social welfare and social justice.

The Liberal Party no longer has a left flank or “wets” — or if it
does they are completely gagged by the newly emerged far right, who have
been given free reign under Abbott. Such as Cory Bernardi, who thinks gay marriage will lead to bestiality and who has had many study trips to the USA to meet Tea Party types; and libertarian activists the Institute of Public Affairs, with its links to shadowy U.S. think tanks and which has also had a huge influence on Abbott’s Coalition.

The politics of most Australians, in my view, would sit on the right
and centre of the ALP, you would have a sizeable percentage, say about
25-30 per cent on the left, and then about 10-15 per cent would be
ideologically comfortable with the Greens.

That is our true political spectrum because the ALP right is, in
truth, right of centre. As a Party, Labor still sits slightly left of
centre, but taken on its own the right faction is really quite
conservative and, as shown by the election of the Right's Bill Shorten
against the vote of the membership, dominant in terms policy formulation and party direction.

Former Labor Foreign Minister Bob Carr was on ABC Lateline last Thursday talking about it being a good idea for Labor to consider copying the Abbott Government’s boat turn back policy.

I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, but then I remembered Bob Carr is a member of the ALP Right. Interestingly, Bob Carr even attempted to enlist Tony Abbott for the ALP in 1970s.

There is an active group from the Labor Left, Labor For Refugees,
that want to soften and humanise the ALP's harsh refugee policy and
make it more compassionate. The Greens, of course, already have a very
compassionate asylum seeker policy.

See what I mean by encompassing the spectrum of political views in
Australian society? Australia's natural political spectrum is
comfortably covered by the ALP and Greens.

We are not a radical rightwing country, nor have we have ever been in
our entire history; the likes of Sir Robert Menzies would be turning
over in his grave at the antics of Abbott and his extremist rightwing
Government.

Abbott and his cohort makes even John Howard look left of centre.

And that could well be why, at the next Federal election, whenever
that may be, we may see something new in Australian politics — a massive
ALP landslide or, possibly, the emergence of our first formal
ALP-Greens Coalition Government.

That is if Tony Abbott’s lunar rightwing Government lasts.

With the challenges of ALP, Greens and PUP in the Senate, as well as
various other cross bench senators, who knows what may happen next.

We live in interesting times.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Madness of King Murdoch

David Donovan 14 July 2014, 7:00pm 25

Media Politics

**Rupert Murdoch talks about setting up The Australian.**

When ageing media mogul Rupert Murdoch sat down for an
interview with Paul Kelly in May, he demonstrated not only his own
weakness, but also the flaws in Australian democracy. Managing editor David Donovan reports.

IT IS ALWAYS A SIGNIFICANT MOMENT when the publisher of 70 per cent
of Australia's newspapers sits down for an interview with one of his
loyal liege men.

And so it was when Rupert Murdoch sat down with Paul Kelly, the grave, grey editor-at-large of Murdoch's national broadsheet, The Australian, to discuss the anniversary of the newspaper's first edition on 14 July 1964, 50 years ago today.

The interview was aired over the weekend on Murdoch's Australian
cable TV channel, Sky News — though it was actually recorded in May in
New York according to boyish host Peter van Onselen. It was shown in two 15 minute segments, with Kelly given the opportunity to preview and provide commentary half-way through.

Murdoch and Kelly faced each other across a typical boardroom table —
Kelly at the head, his pallid head bowed slightly as he looked to his
boss, while Murdoch slouched near the middle, smiling the predatory
smile of an ancient alligator.

Kelly, in his preview, had announced in a portentous baritone that Murdoch had made a "significant" announcement in the interview, which he then rather spoiled by announcing exactly what it was — that starting The Australian had in fact been the idea of Murdoch's father, Sir Keith Murdoch.

They then played the interview, whereupon Murdoch launched into this "revelation" immediately.

"I have to tell ya," said Murdoch, banging the table with a crocodilian claw and leering at Kelly, "it was actually my father's dream. He told me about it as a teenager and in my 30s I got impatient..."

Impatient, unfortunately, was something Kelly was not and he allowed
Murdoch to ramble on disjointedly, as the ageing tycoon did throughout
the interview — smiling, stumbling, stopping, umming,
ahhing, banging the table disconcertingly and following lines of memory
down unexpected rabbit-holes, before stopping confusedly, as if lost
and unsure about exactly how he had arrived there.

Luckily, each time, the dutiful Kelly rescued him with another terse, worshipful question.

"We were young and we were progressive," croaked Murdoch about starting The Australian in 1964.

"And we like to think we still are," he added, cackling.

Kelly nodded sagely, his dour visage betraying nothing, exhibiting
the same unblinking, reverential respect a court official may well have
accorded Mad King George.

Murdoch, for his part, maintained the theme throughout — of an elderly, impish, slightly demented dictator, eagerly embracing a second childhood.

"Starting The Australian was one of my main lifetime achievements," declared Murdoch. "I hope I have many more yet."

Murdoch was asked about the hounding of Gough Whitlam out of office — when journalists at The Australian went on strike over his blatant and heavy-handed editorial interference.

Murdoch was unrepentent. "I think we were right," he grunted.

He was similarly unrepentant over hounding Rudd and Gillard out of their jobs, something Kelly acknowledged News Corp had "received some criticism" about.

"I think it was pretty right," said Murdoch.

In fact, listening to Murdoch, they had never got it wrong.

"We had a vision for Australia," he crowed, "and we still do".

Kelly embraced this theme with his version of enthusiasm: "it is a paper with a definite view of the world, isn't it?" he intoned, to which Murdoch readily concurred.

"It's success is shown through its circulation figures,"
squawked Murdoch, ironically, banging the table, yet again, before then
launching into a long and puzzling dissertation about the time people
apparently spent on The Australian's "app".

Where The Australian found its "view of the world" was evident from Murdoch's rambling, and increasingly random, pronouncements:

On the NBN, cable provider Murdoch said:

“The NBN was a ridiculous idea, still is.”

According to Murdoch, jaw-droppingly:

"Australia already has terrific broadband. You can get 45MBs pretty much wherever you are."

America is a broadband backwater, in comparison, said dotty old Uncle Rupert.

On renewables, pastoralist Murdoch said:

"We can be the low-cost energy country in the world. We shouldn’t be building windmills and all that rubbish.”

Fossil fuel magnate Murdoch said a lot about climate change:

"Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here
and there will always be a bit of it. At the moment the north pole is
melting but the south pole is getting bigger. Things are happening. How
much of it are we doing, with emissions and so on?

"As far as Australia goes? Nothing in the overall picture. There
will be a 3C rise in temperature over 100 years and when that happens
only one of those [degrees] would be manmade. That's the worst case
scenario.

“What it means is if the sea level rises six inches it’s a big
deal, the Maldives might disappear, but we can’t mitigate that, we can’t
stop it, we just have to stop building glass* houses on seashores."

According to Murdoch, people should work for longer, there should be
less welfare and there should be a disincentive towards being
unemployed.

Sound familiar?

Yes, not only is the above the editorial line of all of Murdoch's
media operations in Australia, but it is also that of the Liberal Party.
In fact, close analysis shows there is not a skerrick of difference
between Abbott Government policy and the naturalized American media
tycoon's views, as expressed during Kelly's toadying interview.

And what was Mad King Rupert's opinion of Tony Abbott — one of the most brazenly dishonest politicians in Australia's political history:

“My impression is that he is the most admirable, honest,
principled man, something we really need in a prime minister, someone we
can look up to.”

Then he fired a shot across the bows, presumably in case Abbott might
consider diverging from Rupert's approved radical brand of devil take
the hindmost free market conservatism:

“How much does he [Abbott] understand free markets and what should be happening? I don’t know. Only time will tell.”

Beware the Mad King, Mr Abbott.

As Paul Kelly can tell you, the only way you can earn his rewards
is by absolute acquiescence and grovelling supplication. And as your
King's behaviour becomes even more arrogant and demented, it may become
increasingly testing to foster his favour.

Poor fellow Tony Abbott. Poor fellow our democracy.

* Author's note: Other publications have suggested Murdoch said "vast houses" not "glass houses". The author is not so sure.

You can follows David Donovan on Twitter @davrosz.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

MURDOCH MEDIA EMPIRE AND HIS MINIONS

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Wednesday, July 30, 2014