Non Fiction

UPDATED: Marie Colvin Killed in Homs - targeted by Syrian Army

2012-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

I've often written about the bad side of journalism, and especially that of the Murdoch owned press, but just breaking is some shocking news of the noble sacrifices many journalists make in their attempts to report reality. A civil war which is rapidly becoming one of the bloodiest conflicts has claimed the life of the great Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin. She was killed along with a photographer Remi Ochlik when the building she was staying in was shelled by Syrian government forces. The people who tried to escape were then targeted by rockets. Two other journalist were severely injured in the attack. American born Colvin was the only journalist from a British paper in Syria, and has been described as the Martha Gellhorn of her generation. Witty, acerbic and fearless, only yesterday she filed reports for the BBC and CNN on the carnage in Homs.

“I watched a little baby die today,” she said. “Absolutely horrific. “There is just shells, rockets and tank fire pouring into civilian areas of this city and it is just unrelenting.” In a report published in the Sunday Times over the weekend, Colvin spoke of the citizens of Homs "waiting for a massacre". "The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one," she wrote.

Last year, at a special ceremony in London at St Bride's Church for the 49 British journalists and media workers killed in war reporting over the last decade, Marie, who lost an eye due to shrap covering the Sri Lankan conflict, explained why she took the risks she did.

"Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death... and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash. And yes, it means taking risks, not just for yourself but often for the people who work closely with you. Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes... the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children. Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?"

Of course, the death of one journalist is nothing compared to the thousands of innocent civilians who have been slaughtered by the Syrian regime. Think of a citizen journalist like 26 year old Rami Ahmad Alsayed, killed in the streets of BabrAmr with three of his friends. He maintained a live video stream to provide graphic details of the kind of indiscriminate military terror Assad's forces had unleashed on Homs. Below is moving tribute by his brother of over Rami's body, detailing his wounds. WARNING: upsetting images.

Marie Colvin, who described the situation in Homs as one of the bloodiest and most dangerous she'd ever seen, lost her life reporting how others were losing theirs. Her death brings home to us how lethal the situation is for most Syrians.

"Someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference."

Let's hope that her death, like her life, keeps on making a difference, and this shocking news will shake the international community out of its indifference to the sufferings of Syria.

6:02 AM PT: BBC Reporter Jeremy Bowen has just tweeted this:

Marie Colvin emailed me on Mon from #Homs. said her report previous day in Sunday Times 'was one of those we got in to journalism for'

Here's the link to that heart rending report from the ruins of Homs

http://twitdoc.com/...

6:10 AM PT: And here's Remi Ochlik's Prize Winning Photo from Ras Lanouf in Libya last year

http://www.worldpressphoto.org/...

6:32 AM PT: It now appears that Colvin was deliberately targeted by the Syrian military because of the emotive nature of her reports from Homs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...

Jean-Pierre Perin, a journalist for the Paris-based Liberation newspaper who was with Colvin in Homs last week, claimed they had been told that the Syrian Army was "deliberately" going to shell their centre. Mr Perin said: "A few days ago we were advised to leave the city urgently and we were told: 'If they (the Syrian Army) find you they will kill you'. "I then left the city with the journalist from the Sunday Times but then she wanted to go back when she saw that the major offensive had not yet taken place." Mr Perin, who headed to Beirut from Homs, said the Syrians were "fully aware" that the press centre was broadcasting direct evidence of crimes against humanity, including the murdering of women and children. "The Syrian Army issued orders to 'kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil'." It was in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, that Mr Perin received news of the intercepted Syrian Army radio traffic. The Syrians knew that if they destroyed the press centre, then there would be "no more information coming out of Homs", said Mr Perin.

Originally posted on Daily Kos

How Newscorp Blacked Out Prize Winning Blog through Hacking

2012-01-18T17:28:00+00:00

It's ironic, given that US corporate interests (including one R Murdoch) are complaining about SOPA and how tomorrow/today's internet blackout is an abuse of power, that it's just emerged through the ongoing Leveson Enquiry, that the world's third largest media conglomerate, News Corp, through one of its prestigious titles, The Times of London, hacked the identity of a prize winning blogger and - apparently without revealing this to the courts - fought a privacy case against him to out his real identity and silence his blog.

The blogger in question was Nightjack, a police officer who blogged so brilliantly about the realities of police work that he won the prestigious Orwell Prize in 2009. A few months later, the anonymous blogger was outed by the Times as Richard Horton. As a result he was reprimanded by his police employers, and his blog was deleted. (The mirror site linked above has been retrieved by someone else).

The case caused an outcry in 2009, not only because a valuable voice was lost, but it also resulted in a landmark ruling in the British High Court that a blogger had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”.

During that period the Times had argued it had deduced Horton's identity from the material on his blog. But in his written statement today at the Leveson inquiry, the Times Editor James Harding admitted.

"There was an incident where the newsroom was concerned that a reporter had gained unauthorised access to an email account. When it was brought to my attention, the journalist faced disciplinary action. The reporter believed he was seeking to gain information in the public interest but we took the view he had fallen short of what was expected of a Times journalist. He was issued with a formal written warning for professional misconduct."

However, he failed to mention that the article - written by media correspondent Patrick Foster - was still published, and Horton's privacy case fought successfully by the Times through the courts.

Not only does this connect the hacking scandal beyond the now closed News of the World and The Sun to Murdoch's broadsheet titles, it is also yet another example of egregious corporate double standards. While in the witness box today Harding had the temerity to complain that any kind or regulation would chill 'free speech'.

"We don't want a country in which the government, the state, regulates the papers … we don't want to be in a position where the prime minister decides what goes in newspapers," he said.
He added that if the outcome of the inquiry was a "Leveson act", even one just offering a statutory backstop to an independent press regulator, it would be unworkable.

"The concern is that a Leveson act would give a mechanism to politicians to loom over future coverage," of politics, Harding said, and start introducing amendments to this legislation "and that would have a chilling effect on the press".

This from an editor who was responsible outing a celebrated blogger through hacking and then hounding him to the point of silence

This is timely reminder that the threats to free speech don't just come from governments but from corporations too. This is something I've begun to explore in the first chapter of my book (illustrated by fellow Kossack Eric Lewis) Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch (warning - long quote below the squiggle but I'm only abusing my own copyright)

“To keep the matter in perspective, let me repeat what I said at the beginning of this essay: that in England the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats”
George Orwell: The Prevention of Literature

We’ll never know what Orwell would have made of Rupert Murdoch, a press lord and film magnate, with the bureaucracy of News Corp virtually under his sole control. But over sixty years later, with the collapse of communism, and the near hegemony of market economics, new private bureaucracies have arisen: corporations which in an age of transglobal capital and borderless exchange, could be argued have become almost as powerful as many nation states. The debate about free speech, as evidenced so far by the Leveson Inquiry, has not updated itself to reflect this reality.

In crucial ways, I would argue that – throughout the Hackgate Scandal – we’ve seen vivid evidence of corporate censorship. From the mass deletion of emails, legal pay-outs with attendant non-disclosure orders, redundancies with confidentiality clauses, to professional harassment of lawyers and politicians, there have been clear examples forceful non-disclosure, even if it is in the guise of ‘reputational management’ rather than provable cover-up. But censorship and self-censorship are only the most egregious examples of the chilling of free speech.

As Orwell points out, the suppression of dissenting voices doesn’t have to be negative: it can achieved through the promotion of the favourable point of view, the acquiescent op-ed, the politically correct line. Though it’s not bribery, the blandishment of large fees on favoured politicians or public figures for their ghost-written Opinion pieces both co-opts them and the readership. Suppressio veri: Suggestio falsi. All it takes to promote falsehood is to prevent the truth.

SNIP -

One of the key revelations of the Hackgate scandal is a massive malfunction in the company’s core activity. The pages ahead will describe an ethos – right from Murdoch’s early days in Australia – in which crucial bits of information are withheld from the public for commercial or political leverage. In effect, Murdoch turned news into a currency that could be traded, sometimes with the public, sometimes with other players under the counter. Rather like Enron, the notorious US company which went from provision of energy to trading in energy futures, one can look at News Corps various gambles over the years – from the cross promoting of Sky in The Sun to the promotion of favoured politicians and public figures – as a trading in news futures: i.e. betting on outcomes rather than current events. And just as this kind of derivative trading is liable to consume the original activity (as Enron did by deliberately provoking power cuts in California to manipulate energy prices) I would argue that through both Hackgate and its reaction to it, News Corp has gone from being a news organisation to an anti-news organisation and failed its primary purpose.

As sites throughout the internet go dark tomorrow, we should all remember what is at stake - and how the threats of censorship and suppression of free speech don't only come from the state

UPDATE: Looking again through the legal judgement in 2009 - and comparing with Harding's confession to Leveson yesterday - it's quite clear The Times misled the High Court. Paragraph three of Lord Justice Eady's judgement makes it clear:

3. It was asserted in the Claimant's skeleton for the hearing of 28 May that his identity had been disclosed to The Times in breach of confidence. By the time the matter came before me, on the other hand, Mr Tomlinson was prepared to proceed on the basis that the evidence relied upon from Mr Patrick Foster, the relevant journalist, was correct; that is to say, that he had been able to arrive at the identification by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information available on the Internet.

But it wasn't detective work and deduction. The journalist hacked the blogger's account.

Lincoln once wrote:

The London 'Times' is one of the greatest powers in the world - in fact, I don't know anything which has much more power - except perhaps the Mississippi

And now we know that Murdoch's outlet, once known as the world's prime newspaper of record, not only closed down a fantastic blog by using illegal means to out the blogger, but knowingly deceived the High Court.

Nightjack's anonymity cannot be returned to him. Once out of the bottle, it was gone for good. Lost too where all those great reports from the front line of policing. The internet lost a strong voice, forever. But The Times goes rolling on.

I'm amazed this isn't getting more traction in the UK. In the US it should be more evidence for the ongoing DOJ, FCPA and RICO investigations.

Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 7:21 AM PT: David Allen Green has delivered the killer account of the saga on the News Statesman blog moments ago

http://www.newstatesman.com/...

The killer quote

If the Times did throw its financial and legal might behind a story which they knew to be based on computer hacking and did not inform the court -- or found out later, and still told no one about it -- then that, in my view, would be a scandal perhaps comparable to the tabloids' abuse of phone hacking.

Originally posted to Brit on Wed Jan 18, 2012 at 02:25 AM GMT.

FOTHOM XXXIII: Smoking Guns Confirmed! Corporate Coverup and Phone Hacking on US Soil

2012-01-19T16:37:00+00:00

Today in the High Court, News Group Newpapers, the News Corp subsidiary responsible for the defunct News of the World and The Sun, is settling dozens of hacking and surveillance claimsin an attempt to avoid a high court case on Feb 13th which could result in punitive damages.

There are over 60 hacking victims with ongoing cases, and at least another 800 confirmed and subject to litigation. Financially, this could be very costly for News International. But in terms of the hacking saga, it could be devastating for the Murdochs

Two Smoking Guns

1. In terms of the legal statements now being made in court, perhaps the most important is the admission of corporate cover-up. David Leigh at the stellar Guardian has the most incisive analysis

The most significant new element of Thursday's hacking settlement announcements is the accusation by the hacking victims' lawyers that Murdoch company directors tried to destroy evidence.
Although the lawyers' statement does not name names, it specifically accuses directors of News Group Newspapers Ltd, the Murdoch subsidiary which controlled the News of the World, of seeking to conceal the wrongdoing by "deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence".

The directors of NGN were headed, from April 2008, by James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's son. James has already been at the centre of public allegations that he first authorised a cover-up in June 2008, by agreeing to buy the silence of Gordon Taylor, one of the hacking victims, with a lavish £700,000 secret pay-off.

The following year, former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks joined the NGN board. This was on 23 July 2009, a few days after the Guardian revealed the existence of the cover-up at the News of the World. Brooks, who by now had been promoted by Rupert Murdoch to head his entire UK newspaper operation, responded by claiming: "The Guardian coverage, we believe, has substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public."

This takes the whole phone hacking scandal right to the top of the tree. Who knows what will unfold, but I wouldn't be surprised to see more resignations.

2. But for US readers - and for News Corp which is incorporated in the US - perhaps the most significant revelation in the welter of admissions today is with the Jude Law Case, where NGN's lawyers have admitted that - in line with news reports months ago - they hacked his phone while he was on US soil at JFK. From the Telegraph in June

The News of the World allegedly hacked into the mobile phones of Jude Law and his personal assistant while they were in New York, opening the way for News International to be prosecuted in the United States.
In the first specific example of a case of hacking on US soil, it has emerged that the actor and his assistant, Ben Jackson, were allegedly targeted shortly after arriving at New York's JFK airport.

Their mobile telephones were operating on American networks, meaning that regardless of where the alleged hacker was based, American law would apply.
It would leave News International open to claims that it broke US federal laws and also pave the way for costly lawsuits.

The allegation comes after it was announced that the FBI has opened a preliminary investigation into allegations that Rupert Murdoch's company tried to hack into the phones of victims of the September 11 attacks.

So where does this leave the FBI investigation? The DOJ is still looking at violations Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and potential RICO violations. But this is a clear cut admission of intercepting wireless telephony on US soil.

I'm looking to fellow Kossacks for legal clarification on this and - if possible - to push the DOJ into action.

UPDATE: looks like this is getting some traction stateside. From Vanity Fair contributor and Murdoch Biographer, Michael Wolff:

Be part of the FOTHOM book: Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch

5:38 AM PT: Also, for those interested, today's admissions extend beyond phone hacking

alan rusbridger @arusbridger Close

John Prescott's emails "unlawfully accessed" as well as phone hacked #Leveson #hackgate

That's the editor of the Guardian by the way, talking about the former Deputy Prime Minister having his computer hacked. Operation Tuleta is looking at allegations senior police and counter terrorism officers, as well as other serving ministers, were hacked by NI.

It's like a corporate version of East Germany's STASI.

6:01 AM PT: In the comments below Kossacks have asked me about the legal history of these cases, and I've given a brief sketch of background in this comment here. But more importantly as Brian Cathcart of the Hacked Off campaign writes, we should honour the victims - celebrity or otherwise - who took the grave risk of taking on News International.

A whole industry of deception, in other words, has crumbled thanks to the people compensated today and thanks to their predecessors who settled earlier, notably Sienna Miller.

And pathetic though News International’s legal defence has been lately, suing was never easy for the claimants. Think of the risks they exposed themselves to.

Back in 2010 when many of these cases began life, every politician knew that the Sun and the News of the World could wreck their reputations, and that these papers had more access to the Prime Minister (and his two predecessors) than any backbencher and most ministers. Suing probably looked like political suicide to most MPs.

Across television, cinema and sport, from Hollywood to India, New International owns or controls far more than any other company, so if you were an actress, a sportsman, a football agent or a PR person you risked much more than your time and money by suing — you risked your livelihood.

As for ordinary people whose phones had been hacked, you might think they had nothing to lose by suing, but think again: this is a company that employed private investigators on an industrial scale. Would you be happy to have every aspect of your private life secretly investigated, and if the slightest blemish was found — perhaps involving a vulnerable relative — to have that exposed in the press?

So it took courage for these people to sue, and collectively they made the difference between News International escaping scot free and what we have now: substantial police investigations, a couple of dozen arrests, and the historic and far-reaching Leveson Inquiry.

Originally posted to Brit on Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 12:23 PM GMT.

Hitchens' One Troubling Legacy: Islamofascism

2011-12-21T12:13:10+00:00

The death of Christopher Hitchens is a loss to the world of letters for, as the many eulogies over the last week have proven, he was clearly a stylish writer, a fantastic orator, and from the accounts of those who knew him, a voluble, generous and compassionate friend. But as the last line of Some Like It Hot makes clear: "No-one is perfect." Given that Hitchens never stood on ceremony, and was a great slayer of sacred cows, it wouldn't be fitting to note his passing without decrying one of his more otiose and unfortunate legacies: as the inventor and populariser of the term Islamofascism.

Here's the problem. Fascism and Islamic fundamentalism have little if anything in common. Fascism is - by definition - a form of extreme nationalism which shades, in its Nazi version, into radical theories of racial superiority and competition. For all their many evils, extremist Islamic jihadist movements are by definition not nationalistic. That's their point. They are often para-state movements directed against national states, and aim for a transnational unification of the ummah, the global population of believers. As for the racial component, one of reasons Islam spread so quickly across the globe from 500-1500 was that it had virtually no ethnic component. One only has to look at the internationalistic nature of Al Qaeda in its heyday to see that ethnic purity was hardly a key qualification. So what does this matter? The term might confuse two distinct historical movements, but only a pedant would care about that. So what if it displayed some historical amnesia? Islamofascism evoked the forces of repression and terror we've faced for the last two decades. Above all the phrase was catchy. What's wrong with that? That's my point. It was too catchy. And you can trace some of the most startling foreign policy blunders and domestic problems through the spread of this glaring misunderstanding. 1. In international affairs, the term created a false link between the genuinely fascist elements of Ba'athist or Nasserite nationalism with their fundamentalist opponents such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda. It gave credence to the now provably false propaganda that Saddam Hussein was an ally of Bin Laden. We know how well that ended... 2. On a domestic level, it united an eclectic mixture of anti clerics, atheists, old new lefties, conservatives, racists and neo-cons could all unite against the Islamic threat as if they were a popular front replay of the 1930s. But the minority Muslim populations across Europe have nothing in common with the populistic mass movements led by Franco, Mussolini or Hitler. Indeed, the spectre of Islamofascism gave cover to genuinely fascistic movements such as the EDL and the Islamophobia which spurred Anders Breivik's murderous spree. 3. It encouraged the schoolboy debasement of the term Fascism to the point that even a so-called intellectual such as Jonah Goldberg to coin the term 'Liberal Fascists' - and risks invoking a wider version of Godwin's Law which states, anyone who ends up referring to the Nazis in an unrelated debate is close to losing the argument 4. And of course, it is a crime by association for 1.1 billion believers in the various forms of Islam, encouraging the belief that Muslim states (from Turkey or Indonesia) have a deep ideological drive to commit a second holocaust In 2006, the late lamented Tony Judt wrote a brilliant essay for the New York Review of Books, called 'Bush's Useful Idiots' about how so many liberal intellectuals had enabled the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. Many of those who supported the invasion have, with the wisdom of hindsight, accepted how they were misled by the false intelligence over the connections between Bin Laden and Saddam - between Islamism and Fascism. They have regretted the disastrous consequences of applying the rhetoric of World War II to the War on Terror. For some reason, Christopher Hitchens never regretted this false association. But to pay tribute to his spirit of polemic and provocation, it's worth pointing out that his legacy was far from perfect, and that - though no thinker is responsible for the trajectory of his or her ideas - it's the duty of others to point out stupid ideas can cost lives.

Cryptofascist? The Problem with Frank Miller

2011-11-26T14:26:26+00:00

As my colonial cousins recover from an overdose of turkey and tryptophan, let me prod you into consciousness with the Frank Miller problem - which also allows me to post some awesome pics.

No, the Frank Miller problem isn't as simple as you think. From his slapdash rant about the OWS movement on his website, it seems to quite clear where Frank's political sympathies lie:

"Occupy" is nothing short of a clumsy, poorly-expressed attempt at anarchy, to the extent that the "movement" - HAH! Some "movement", except if the word "bowel" is attached - is anything more than an ugly fashion statement by a bunch of iPhone, iPad wielding spoiled brats who should stop getting in the way of working people and find jobs for themselves.
This is no popular uprising. This is garbage. And goodness knows they're spewing their garbage - both politically and physically - every which way they can find.

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.

Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

And this enemy of mine - not of yours, apparently - must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh - out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.

In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas' basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft (sic).

I said it seems to be quite clear where Miller's political thinking lies: except nothing is clear in this inchoate melange of addled testosterone, islamophobia, and shock jock cliche.

Surprise, surprise. Frank Miller writes dark, paranoid cartoon books. His political thinking is dark, paranoid and cartoonish.

This is not the real Frank Miller problem - except for him - and anyone who expected anything else.

Peter Jukes :: Cryptofascist? The Problem with Frank Miller: Open Thread

The Real Frank Miller Problem

Hopefully, Miller's political rantings will make some of the Occupy supporters in London think again when they sport V-for-Vendetta masks, and therefore assume this is some left revolutionary uprising of the masses. Though Alan Moore is a much more sophisticated story teller, aware of the violent illiberal tendencies of his heroes, there's nothing in the Guido Fawkes character that couldn't be equally conscripted by a right wing populist.

And this brings me to the nub of the issue: can you read off fiction against politics, or vice versa. Rick Moody puts the case in his essay Frank Miller and the rise of cryptofascist Hollywood.

Miller's hard-right, pro-military point of view is not only accounted for in his own work, but in the larger project of mainstream Hollywood cinema. American movies, in the main, often agree with Frank Miller, that endless war against a ruthless enemy is good, and military service is good, that killing makes you a man, that capitalism must prevail, that if you would just get a job (preferably a corporate job, for all honest work is corporate) you would quit complaining. American movies say these things, but they are more polite about it, lest they should offend. The kind of comic-book-oriented cinema that has afflicted Hollywood for 10 years now, since Spider-Man, has degraded the cinematic art, and has varnished over what was once a humanist form, so Hollywood can do little but repeat the platitudes of the 1%. And yet Hollywood tries still not to offend.

I kind of go along with this thesis: especially the domination of the DC and Marvel franchises which have so saturated Hollywood. Compared with the 70s - where realistic story telling and improvisatory acting were at a premium - the movies of the early 21st Century aspire in their acting and subtlety and realism to the state of a cartoon. (Fortunately great actors and writers have a refuge in USTV).

But then I stop short. Rick Moody puts Gladiator into this genre.

which I still contend is an allegory about George W Bush's candidacy for president, despite the fact that director and principal actor were not US citizens. Is it possible to think of a film such as Gladiator outside of its political subtext? Are Ridley Scott's falling petals, which he seems to like so much that he puts them in his films over and over again, anything more than a way to gussy up the triumph of oligarchy, corporate capital and globalisation?

And here we have it - the whole problem of reading fiction as politics. Gladiator as an allegory for George Bush? How bonkers can you get?

Hopefully, more bonkers still. Moody's reading of the Ridley Scott classic is as revealing about himself as it is about the movie. And that is the joy of fiction: taste and interpretation is entirely subjective. Meanings are not enclosed and enforced as in polemic or propaganda. The drama of the story is dialogic - it lets you take two sides at the same time. (As Shakespeare says in King Lear "That's true too")l. Art is open ended, descriptive rather than prescriptive, and let's you frame your own metaphors. And rarely are stories allegories like Orwell's Animal Farm or Miller's The Crucible , and even when they are, they take on a complex life of their own.

Most stories play with political and real life events, but with no definitive read off. I remember as a politicised 19 year old, having loved reading Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy in my early teens, worrying whether Sauron was Hitler or Stalin, Saruman Mussolini or Hitler. Though the story of the Ring of Power is definitely Tolkien's response to Germanic myths of power and domination (the inscription even echoes the Hitlerian "Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Fuhrer") it is ridiculous to go beyond some deep metaphoric echoes. Had Tolkien wished to make a simple political or historical statement he would have made it. Fiction creates its own internal dynamics, and from fairy tales to classical tragedy to morally complex anti heroes like Tony Soprano or Harry Lime in The Third Man, allows us to experience the clash of ideas and characters, without taking sides, or taking all sides.

So the meaning of a writers work often escapes its maker. There are dozens of artists whose politics I abhor, but whose writings I still love. Take the case of some great 20th Century poets - Yeat's fascist nationalism, Eliot's anti-semitism, Philip Larkin's racist conservatism, Bertolt Brecht's collaboration with Stalinism. Where their political beliefs obtrude into their work or - as in the case of Ezra Pound - they become pure propagandists, their statements can be rebutted and excoriated for what they are.

But these writers weren't full time politicians. We only know of their politics because of their lyric talents. In the more epic world of fiction - whether it's a mirror to reality or a fantasy alternative world - meanings are fluid, metaphors are mysterious, characters and events memory precisely because they are intractable and irreducible to a simple message. By definition, works of art contain emotional and unconscious force which the artist cannot control or describe. Therefore we're presented in a great comic book, novel, poem, movie or painting with densely complex statement, something which rewrites its meaning every time a new viewer watches it.

In short - Frank Miller's politics are stupid, paranoid and frankly laughable.

But still the Dark Knight will survive the idiocy of his maker.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH XXVII: James Recalled, lacks Recall - Police Stop My Protest

2011-11-11T21:12:44+00:00

Today in Parliament

As expected, the appearance of James Murdoch, the Chief Executive of News International (and related to some other famous people) before the DCMS Committee today failed to produce any huge bombshells. Let's remind ourselves that the Parliamentary Committee has no real powers of subpoena, witnesses are not obliged to testify on oath, is not run by trained lawyers, and is not allowed to investigate anything that could prejudice the three ongoing police investigations.

C-Span has the whole proceedings here

James is smart, lawyered up, and left no hostages to fortune in terms of his evidence. Tom Watson had some stellar moments, challenging James over various contradictory testimonies, naming three or four other private investigators working for News International (adding some cryptic reference to Operation Millipede), and at least landing a rhetorical blow by calling James

'the first mafia boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise.'.

(This latter remark has caused some consternation among Watson's enemies and Murdoch's apologists - but my American friends will know that the Department of Justice IS looking at potential RICO violations by Newscorp)

All in all, another day in the ongoing Murdoch saga. As Britover puts it in an excellent rec-listed diary: Some top line people really need to face jailtime. The most senior executive of the sixteen so far arrested has been Rebekah Brooks: but though James might not feel the hand of the law on his shoulder, the media scrutiny of his performance could be just as damaging in the long run.

Unanswered Questions

But however evasive and well trained James is at avoiding direct questions ("I have no knowledge of that... I don't recall") there are three glaring contradictions that this appearance has underlined.

1. Someone has Misled Parliament over the information provided to James when he authorised an extraordinary 700,000 GBP payment to Gordon Taylor in a civil suit over his phone being hacked by News of the World. James' claim in his previous appearance in July that he had no knowledge of phone hacking beyond the rogue reporter Clive Goodman had been directly contradicted by evidence given by the editor of NOTW at the time, Colin Myler, and News International's chief legal adviser, Tom Crone. They claim they informed James when he made that settlement. James now claims they didn't tell him, and that they misled Parliament rather than him.

TW: Did you mislead this committee?
JM: No I did not

TW: If you didn't who did?

JM I believe his committee was given [evidence] by people without full possession of the facts or...it was economical. My own testimony has been consistent. I testify to this committee with as much clarity and transparency as I can.

TW: Was it Mr Crone [who misled the committee?]
JM: I thought it was inconsistent and

TW: So you agree he misled the committee
JM: It follows that I do. I believe their testimony was misleading and I dispute it

This is a kind of either/or argument that the Committee will comment on: both accounts cannot be true.

2. How can an Effective Chief Executive be so ineffectual? James consistent response to the mounting evidence of extensive phone hacking, blagging and other borderline illegal activities by his staff was 'how am I supposed to know that level of detail'. Fair enough. But when you're making multimillion pound payouts to Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford, with dozens of other suits pending, surely it's your corporate duty to find out.

This is now being called the Asda Moment - 'Asda' is the UK equivalent of Walmart.

After explaining that he used to work for the supermarket chain (owned by the giant US company, Walmart) Davies registered his incredulity that Murdoch could have authorised the payment of more than £500,000 (to Taylor) without inquiring deeply into the reasons.
"It all seems so cavalier to me," said Davies. "You agree to settle cases with no real cap but a ballpark figure. You agree that a company should have a legal opinion, but you don't even ask to see the opinion when it is written."

3. A Fit and Proper Person? Next month is the shareholders meeting of BSkyB, Britain's largest pay-for-TV operator, 39.14% owned by Newscorp. Though the public outcry and online petitioning (by groups such as Avaaz) effectively stopped the full takeover of the company this summer, James still chairs the board. Our broadcast regulator, Ofcom, has a statutory duty to make sure that owners of licensed broadcasters are 'fit and proper' and can revoke a license if a director fails that test.

By the time BSkyB meets next, the DCMS committee will have ruled whether James has deceived Parliament or not.

Is being either/or a 'liar' or completely incompetent enough? Or even better - both.

In other News

Your intrepid reporter made ~~a fool of himself~~ an appearance outside Parliament for James' testimony. Bedecked like a human press pack, Brit decided to protest about the 30 years of Murdoch influence by sporting a sandwich board illustrated by fellow Kossack Eric Lewis, bearing the understated message:

Murdoch Ruined my Life.

Above you can see him above talking to a French journalist. Tonight he will appear on Al Jazeera. Below he joins members of the Avaaz campaign also picketing parliament.

When it's processed, I'll also post a video of him picketing Portcullis House where James was supposed to arrive, only to be stopped by a policeman and told (much to his shock and amazement) that no protests or placards are allowed within a kilometre of Parliament without prior approval, and I could be arrested. I told the very polite and helpful officer that I wasn't protesting, merely advertising the book I'm writing with Eric Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch. The policeman said he didn't hear that, because advertising without a licence could also earn me a night in the cells.

I'm not as brave as many in the Occupy Movement, and rapidly removed my billboards.

There will be more about the book in later posts. It will be loosely based on my Kossack series of diaries, and focus on the stellar 'crowd sourced' journalism, reportage and activism of my fellow bloggers. It will also be crowd sourced in funding, so we'll be hitting back at the command and control modus operandi of the main stream media both in form and content.

Meanwhile join me below to discuss what you make of this latest chapter in the FOTHOM saga. And do contribute to the dedicated Bad Press: Fall of the House of Murdoch website if you can

The Dynasty is Over: FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH XXVI: BREAKING:

2011-10-25T19:59:48+00:00

{jb_dropcap}No, there is no major news about the three major investigations into multiple phone and computer hacking, bribing police officials, or perverting the course of justice by News International in the the UK. Nor is there any major development in the DOJ investigation into the parent company Newscorp, for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or other examples of systemic criminality (RICO violations) like the Floorgraphics case. No, the simple stunning verdict on the Murdoch Dynasty has been delivered by Newscorps Shareholders

Shareholders Deliver a Damning Verdict on James and Lachlan Murdoch

As handsomely diaried by Ceebs, last Friday's Newscorp shareholders meeting, held in high security in LA rather than in New York, was still a tumultuous affair, with many of independent shareholders calling the management to task over issues of corporate governance, probity, possible further legal actions, and of course the underlying complaint that Rupert Murdoch treats the public corporation like a 'family candy store'. Usually as Murdoch's biographer Michael Wolff explains in a tellingly titled piece: Rupert Murdoch: News Corp's great dictator on the brink

Under normal circumstances, Rupert Murdoch doesn't have much patience for the annual shareholders' meetings that are required by law of American public companies. He regards them as a farce, because they cannot change the outcome in a company where a voting majority is secure, and as an exercise in liberal corporate law designed to put him personally on the spot.

This time it was different. This time the voices couldn't be ignored, and they were joined by the stalwart British Parliamentarian, Tom Watson, initially a victim and now a persistent campaigner against both the industrial scale phone hacking in the UK (among other illegal practices) and the coverup. The vote was supposed to be delivered here last week. Now you can see the reason for the delay. Pegasus Corporate Governance has just tweeted the independent votes:

2011 AGM James Murdoch: For 59,297,033 (19.23%), Against 232,013,203 (75.24%) Abstain 494,831 Non-Votes 16,564,060

2011 AGM Lachlan Murdoch: For 67,175,479 (21.78%), Against 224,151,616 (72.69%) Abstain 477,972 Non-Votes 16,564,060

It doesn't constitute a majority since, though only owning 10 percent of the shares, the Murdoch family have 40 percent of the voting rights. But this is like Thatcher winning the first round of the votes in 1990 - not by a big enough margin. She was holed in the water. The vote of non confidence is resounding. As the Guardian puts it:

James Murdoch's future at News Corporation looks increasingly precarious as shareholders delivered a damning verdict on his tenure amid widespread criticism of his handling of the hacking scandal. Following a contentious meeting in Los Angeles last week News Corporation shareholders lodged a massive protest vote against James and his brother Lachlan Murdoch. A majority of independent shareholders voted against the re-election of chairman Rupert Murdoch's sons James and Lachlan Murdoch. James Murdoch received the largest vote against his re-election at 35%. James, 38, faces a second grilling in the Parliament next month over phone-hacking at The News of The World, one of News Corp's UK newspapers. Some 34% of shareholders voted against Lachlan Murdoch 40. After subtracting the shares controlled by Rupert Murdoch, 67% of the votes went against James Murdoch and 64% against Lachlan, said Julie Tanner, assistant director of News Corp investor Christian Brothers Investment Services (CBIS), who last week called for Rupert Murdoch to step down as chairman after the "extraordinary scandals" at the company. "Shareholders are saying loud and clear that this board has failed as a group," she said.

A Family at War: the Rift between Generations

So that's it. In case you missed it, last week there was a well substantiated New York Times storysaying the father was blaming the son for the debacle of the phone hacking coverup:

It was the newspaper business that would ultimately prove the point of deepest fissure between father and son. After taking control of News International, the company’s British newspaper subsidiary that publishes The Times of London, The Sun and News of the World until it was shuttered this summer, James made some abrupt course corrections. SNIP - fascinating aside about Murdoch and Gordon Brown It was in his role as head of the newspaper division that James approved a 2008 settlement with Gordon Taylor, head of an organization representing Britain’s professional soccer players, over allegations of voice mail hacking. That settlement is now at the center of a significant public dispute between James and two former News Corporation executives in London, who offer a conflicting account of events leading to the payment. The executives claim that they had informed James that the voice mail hacking went beyond the work of a lone “rogue” reporter and a private investigator that the company had acknowledged at the time. If that was the case, then law enforcement could argue that the settlement was intended as an attempt to buy the silence of victims, which legal experts say could provide the basis for British prosecutors to pursue criminal charges. James has forcefully denied their assertion, saying the men did not tell him about a broader pattern of phone hacking. Some who know him have suggested that the most he is guilty of is listening to advisers who told him the settlement would be less costly than a court fight.

With James Murdoch due to return to parliament in just over a week to answer more questions about how he could have possibly conceived it was a sole reporter involved in phone hacking, his days are clearly numbered. With both sons now discredited, and Elisabeth leaving the board, the dynastic control over Newscorp is over but in name. Poetic justice really, since Rupert, who inherited millions and the newspaper business from his father, has always claimed to be a buccaneering self-made man, and an enemy of the Royal Family because of their inherited privilege. But the story isn't over. Michael Wolff predicts last week was Rupert's shareholder's meeting. The police investigations are far from finished, and the evidence of corporate malfeasance and coverup is rife both sides of the Atlantic.

An Obloquy to End All Obloquies

But I'll leave the best recent tirade against Murdoch to one of his former colleagues: the Canadian born former newspaper proprietor, Conrad Black, who still languishes in jail because of his crimes and misdemeanours. It seems prison time has actually done wonders for his sense of probity. As he fulminates in the Huffington Post

For decades, Murdoch has smeared, lied, double-crossed his political benefactors, including Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, a long sequence of Australian leaders, and the democratic forces of Hong Kong. When the extent of his skullduggery finally oozed out, sluggish and filthy, including the details of the British government's dotage on him, this summer, Murdoch's old possum routine didn't play as convincingly as it had in its many previous auditions, when he purported to be contrite over the shortcomings of errant employees. Bumbling into a parliamentary hearing in London, supported on each arm like a centenarian semi-cadaver, mumbling about humility, trying to represent News Corporation's board as independent when it is public corporate America's most docile board of directors and is composed entirely of hacks, retainers, and ex-employees; scrambling and whimpering and paying millions to victims of his outrages; putting his name on a Journal op-ed piece about education; it's all of a piece and none of it resonates anymore. SNIP My admiration for his boldness and acumen and our previous 25 years of more than civil relations make it unpleasant, despite his unspeakable assault on me, to have to conclude that he is, in my personal belief, a psychopath. I think behind his nondescript personality lurks a repressed, destructive malice. His is, and has been proved to be, in some measure, a criminal organization. This, apart from weaknesses of leadership, was always the greatest vulnerability of post-Reagan America's conservatism: its reliance on a man who would put anyone over the side and hoist any colours when the wind changed. SNIP In the extreme winter of his days, Rupert Murdoch's failing hands have dropped the mask; he is a malignant force and it would be a good thing for the world to be done with him.

Wow. So Rupe's off his Christmas Card list I bet. 2011 was a year when dictators fell. Let's ensure that Murdoch joins Ben Ali, Muburak and Gaddafi in the list of toppled tyrants.

Occupy London: Some First Impressions: UPDATED - Assange Speaks

2011-10-16T19:27:52+00:00

As you probably all know, the Square Mile of the City of London is the world's second biggest financial centre, and ever since the mid 80s has very much followed suit in the Thatcher Reagan concoction of deregulated markets, fluid global finance, strange derivatives, and the sharp increase in wealth inequality that comes from the 'Anglo Saxon Model'. Indeed, the problems of the last three years are very much an international problem, with a transatlantic origin. So it's about time the Occupy London movement took root.

I live on the edge of the City, only a ten minute walk from St Paul's where the demonstrations began at Noon today, so it hardly showed great radical commitment to head down there, be a witness and a supporter, before heading back to diary what I saw. I would have stayed, but my daughter is not well, and I didn't want to get 'kettled' (contained) by the police, and unable to look after her this evening.

So here are some images. It is a preternaturally warm day here in London, and the crowds were pleasant, well behaved and peaceful. It was a great mix of people

Not many people had sleeping bags, and many tourists visit this spot, so it was sometimes hard to separate the tourists from the demonstrators: but many of the demonstrators seemed to come from all over Europe.

Of course, some of the banners were held by the Socialist Workers Party, and some of the more active groups - here blocking the street - were part of the revolutionary fringe. But they were good humoured and entirely peaceful too.

They also chanted "these are our streets" - a sentiment I entirely concur with (especially since the Reclaim the Streets movement cite my book A Shout in the Street as part of their inspiration :-) little plug here)

Though obviously not ALL streets are public.

The revolution will be televised, and as well as legal observers, endless camera crews, everyone seem to have their phone cameras at work.

The police presence grew considerably in the hour or so I was there, with vans arriving every minute. They'd obviously underestimated the size of the demo.

Though London life still goes on. Just around the corner, by St Bartholomew's church, the local clergy were completely oblivious to the thousands on the demo

After the riots of the summer and the looting, the student demos earlier this year (including an attack on the Prince of Wales' limo), I'm not surprised the police are out in force. But I hope they don't repeat the brutality that killed an innocent passer by during the globalisation demos several years ago (the police officer is facing trial - as should the NYPD motorcyclist yesterday IMHO).

Back home, there is still a helicopter overhead, and many police sirens. The streets are jammed. I hope it all goes off peaceably, but also that it makes an impact. I'll update if any other news comes in and try to upload some videos - if I work out how and if they're at all worth it.

UPDATE: Should have stayed a little longer. It seems Julian Assange addressed the crowd minutes after I left (though everyone has been kettled and I would have been stuck for hours). Here's some pictures of him arriving in a V for Vendetta mask. He was cautioned and interviewed before being allowed to continue.

He got to speak to the assembled press, if not the crowds.

Wherever there is corruption in the world... it ends in London

FOTHOM XXV: BREAKING: Wall Street Journal Scam Exposed

2011-10-12T21:57:45+00:00

Over the course of these diaries, both myself and other FOTHOM aficianados have tried to stress that the UK hacking scandal is just one indication of the corrupt and anti-competitive practices that characterise the modal monopoly of Newscorp. Now another scandal is breaking which, like the looming shareholder rebellion, allegations of satellite card hacking in Italy and the Floorgraphics case prove once again that - like Watergate - the current scandal being investigated by no less than three large scale police operations in the UK, is only the tip of the iceberg, and that RICO violations are the best way for the current DOJ investigation to go.

Now the Wall Street Journal has news of the resignation of one of its chief executives:

LONDON—Dow Jones & Co.'s top European executive resigned Tuesday following an internal investigation into two articles published in The Wall Street Journal Europe that featured a company with a contractual link to the paper's circulation department.
Andrew Langhoff, managing director of Dow Jones & Co. in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and publisher of The Wall Street Journal Europe, stepped down after an internal probe showed two articles in the paper's Special Reports section had been prompted by an agreement the circulation department struck with Executive Learning Partnership, or ELP, a Netherlands-based consulting firm.

"That relationship, overseen by a now-former employee, is no longer in place," Mr. Langhoff said in an internal email to employees. "Because the agreement could leave the impression that news coverage can be influenced by commercial relationships, as publisher with executive oversight, I believe that my resignation is now the most honorable course," Mr. Langhoff said.

Dow Jones is a unit of News Corp., which owns all editions of The Wall Street Journal.

Of course, this didn't happen by accident, and once again it seems to be the result of crusading investigative journalism by the Guardian:

One of Rupert Murdoch's most senior European executives has resigned following Guardian inquiries about a circulation scam at News Corporation's flagship newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.
The Guardian found evidence that the Journal had been channelling money through European companies in order to secretly buy thousands of copies of its own paper at a knock-down rate, misleading readers and advertisers about the Journal's true circulation.

The bizarre scheme included a formal, written contract in which the Journal persuaded one company to co-operate by agreeing to publish articles that promoted its activities, a move which led some staff to accuse the paper's management of violating journalistic ethics and jeopardising its treasured reputation for editorial quality.

Internal emails and documents suggest the scam was promoted by Andrew Langhoff, the European managing director of the Journal's parent company, Dow Jones and Co, which was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July 2007. Langhoff resigned on Tuesday.

RICO: A Pattern of Criminal and Anti Competitive Behaviour

As I pointed out in a previous diary, the anti-competitive and completely unjournalistic standards of Newscorp now constitute a modal monopoly in much of the English speaking world:

Now we know that financially, Newscorp has paid much more than $200 million in the past to settle lawsuits, and indeed has paid out three times as much as that to settle various lawsuits against its profitable marketing division, News America. Apart from the hacking allegations and the FCPA violations (suborning foreign officials) there is now ample evidence, in the US and elsewhere (cf Italyand Australia) that Newscorp has a standard modus operandi when dealing with the 'free market'.
1. Establish leverage over politicians to change anti monopoly legislation
2. Dumping - artificially lowered prices to destroy competitors (cf News America, London Times)
3. Industrial espionage against competitors using a variety of means including phone hacking (Floorgraphics, Daily Mirror etc.)

For those following this story in Newscorp's home country, the US, there is now ample evidence of a sustained pattern of behavior liable to a RICO violation.

So now we have two more elements to add to the Newscorp strategy for media dominance

4. Churnalism: information paid for by sponsors, contributors or PR agencies.

5. Massaging Circulation Figures to deceive advertisers.

As I've said before, Newscorp the Standard Oil of the Information Age, and exposing its abuse of power is a key part in breaking up this uncompetitive trust.

As American activists continue to occupy Wall Street, don't forget The Wall Street Journal, both as a mouthpiece for deregulated markets and unaccountable globalised finance, and as a living demonstration of how it works.

Cross posted at Daily Kos.

Magnetic Reversals: the Political Compass Shifts

2011-10-11T14:22:50+00:00

This is partially inspired by a conversation on Labour List, the premier British Left of Centre blog, where a version of the Political Compass Test was taken by several diverse commenters.

Now most people who visit the political blogosphere know the parameters of that test: authoritarian/libertarian, socially interventionist/economically interventionist. Like Myers-Briggs, these are static and almost self fulfilling quadrants which test how much you believe in individual freedom versus social responsibility, whether in crime, foreign affairs, the economy, gun ownership or reproductive rights. We all know the tests, and probably where we come out in them. I think that the events of the last three years make that compass profoundly irrelevant, an old paradigm which can only provide a direction in an outdated map.

Follow me below the fold while I suggest that the old metrics no longer apply and we are in a new world looking for new bearings.

Our compasses rely on the electromagnetic field of the earth. North is north, and south is south, but declinations which place the magnetic poles thousands of miles away from the astronomical poles around which the earth rotates.

So my hunch is: we're going through a paradigm shift, a once-in-a-generation shift of the old polarities.

To put it in a nutshell: the metrics of the political compass make complete sense from about 1979 till 2008. It was in the 70s that the conservative right, thanks to several Austrian thinkers who had experienced the failure of democratic politics in the 30s, became the 'liberal' party, of anti state liberty. For thirty five years previously, the social democratic left had ruled the roost in both Europe and the US, creating the welfare state, the Great Society, and building institutions of economic and political governance, from Bretton Woods to the UN, which essentially said the untrammelled individual and national pursuit of liberty and self interest had to be reined in.

But then came the calamities of the 70s, and the rise of Friedman and Hayek, Thatcher and Reagan. Suddenly the right took the mantle of liberty (having been associated with reactionary and backward thinking before). Their great achievements were privatisation, globalisation, and capturing the language of individual liberty.

Three years ago, during the first credit crunch, I sensed a profound economic shift. That Anglo Saxon model, which seemed to have delivered so much wealth, was now in such a parlous state that it was too big to fail. In a massive transfer of wealth, both sides of the Atlantic, trillions of dollars (in real terms enough to have paid for the Manhattan Project, the Apollo Missions, the Great Society and the New Deal, and the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq Wars) were transferred by the tax payer to bond holders and private debt holders. Like the 1930s, the state had stepped in to save Capitalism.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of 'actually existing' state socialism, we had a new socialism: Socialism for the Rich.

Now this solved no problems. If the banks were 'too big to fail in 2008', the mergers and government support had made not only fewer bigger banks, but also increased the moral hazard of private investors taking inordinate risks because they know their losses will be mitigated by the taxpayer. So three years on from the credit crunch, things have just become worse.

There are a plethora of other much more knowledgeable diarists and economists who have been saying this for years. However, what I've noticed in the last few months is that this message is sinking in with the general population. Maybe they've just seen nothing change. Maybe they've seen the fantastic documentary movie Inside Job . Or maybe it's more brutal - they just lack the 'inside jobs' and having waited for two years for 'normal service' to resume, realise it will never come back

That means a paradigm shift has happened. The old model no longer delivers.

In such a situation, the old politics of market research, lobbying, triangulation and playing off of interests no longer works. In such a situation, things happen catastrophically. Modal monopolies such as Newscorp or the investment banks in Wall Street, suddenly collapse or lose credibility. In such a situation, the polarities change and our compasses must constantly be recalibrated.

In such a situation there is no middle ground anymore. Not because moderation doesn't matter, but the notion of the middle has been turned on its head. Now I'm no opponent of entrepreneurs. I believe markets can be much more efficient at delivering services than centralised governments. I believe in individual liberty, competition, and striving to create new products which make people's lives better. This would probably make me some kind of capitalist - along with the vast majority in both our nations. But when the massive transfers of wealth go from tax payers to those who are trying to protect their wealth from the vagaries of the market; when the banking system, which should just be a vehicle for transferring money from the investors to creators, becomes an end in itself; when the high finance capitalist system ceases to produce wealth, or jobs, or rising living standards, or an equitable and sustainable society: then the paradigm shifts and must be radically revised.

Tony Judt, friend and mentor, wrote one last book before he died, Ill Fares the Land, where he described how (having been an opponent of communist rule and friend and supporter of many dissidents) he found the language of markets, globalisation, deregulation and laissez faire, as dogmatic, illiberal and mendacious in the West at the beginning of the 21st Century as the Communist cant about equality and fairness was in the Soviet Union in the 50s.

So this is a paradigm shift. I spoke to a Bosnian friend of mine who is a bond trader the other day. He says the market is f**ked, because it doesn't know what it wants. The market wants the Greek Austerity plan to succeed so they can reduce their debt. It also wants it to fail because it knows that you can't shrink the debt without growth. It's socially and financially unfeasible. He said the one thing that gives any of the market any direction is the promise of government intervention Thatcher said you can't buck the market. She was wrong. Markets need to be bucked. They need to be reined in and controlled for the good of their electorates.

The problem is though we can't nationalise any markets an ymore. Corportations outsource overseas. Bankers transfer to the Cayman Islands in a blink of an eye. We can't nationalise anything. We have to internationalise it.

So we're back to 1945, when all the institutions of the post World War II era of peace and growth were built: the UN, EU, NATO, Bretton Woods. But the compass has shifted. My prediction For the last thirty years, discussions of political economy were dominated by the economists. For the next few years it will be politics that triumphs over economics in the political economy: and conversations like this will be all important.

Originally posted on Motley Moose and Daily Kos

FOTHOM XXIV: 64 Lawsuits Already - Will be 'Thousands'

2011-10-05T18:32:56+00:00

yes, the Murdoch story may be flying under the mainstream media radar, but with three British police investigations ongoing, two Parliamentary committees, a televised public enquiry with full powers of subpoena starting tomorrow, a DOJ enquiry stateside, and other investigations and legal cases in the US, Australia and Italy into Newscorp anti-competitive and/or criminal behaviour, this is not about to go away any time soon.

Hackgate: A Pattern of Criminal Behaviour

As an early indication of this, it has just been announced that over sixty separate claims (some filed in multiple names) have been filed in the UK civil claims court against News International: these include dozens of celebrities and prominent politicians, but also the families or partners of murder victims, or casualties of other high profile incidents such as the 7/7 London bombings. These weren't people who thrust themselves into the limelight - but people who had already been violated by some awful event, only to have their own privacy violated by illegal means by a company whose only interest was profit and using press exposure to exert political power. According to The Guardian

The overwhelming majority of the writs have been issued jointly against News Group Newspapers, the News International subsidiary that published the now defunct News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked under contract for the Sunday tabloid. However, one – by singer Cornelia Crisan – also names the former News of the World chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, and another of the paper's former reporters as defendants in her claim. It is the first phone-hacking lawsuit to target Thurlbeck. He was arrested and bailed in April for alleged phone hacking but has not been charged. He is suing News International for unfair dismissal. Thurlbeck said: "As I said last week, the truth will out. But this will be in the law courts and at a public tribunal." The number and range of the claims has taken some legal observers by surprise. One source said it suggests that News International's £20m contingency fund to deal with legal claims will not be anywhere near enough to cover the final total.

Now this is all based on the files of Glynn Mulcaire, but as the Mark Lewis, the lawyer who broke the current storm with news of the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler (a teenage murder victims) explains:

"So far, fewer than 5% of the victims of Glenn Mulcaire have been notified," said Mark Lewis, a lawyer for some phone-hacking victims in an email. "He was just one agent used by one paper. When the final tally takes place, we will see thousands of claims and more than one paper." SNIP Mr. Lewis said that, as the number of plaintiffs grows, his own estimate that the New York-based company would need at least £100-million to settle such claims looks like "a serious underestimate." News Group agreed to pay one of Mr. Lewis's clients, the family of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, £3-million, a person familiar with the matter said last month. Mr. Lewis said that the rash of suits may have been triggered by a deadline set by Judge Geoffrey Vos to consider claims ahead of a January trial to determine how much News Corp. should pay in damages to five of the victims.

So this is just phone hacking, and just the UK. But let's be clear. This is still just the tip of the iceberg. .

RICO: A Pattern of Criminal and Anti Competitive Behaviour

Now we know that financially, Newscorp has paid much more than $200 million in the past to settle lawsuits, and indeed has paid out three times as much as that to settle various lawsuits against its profitable marketing division, News America. Apart from the hacking allegations and the FCPA violations (suborning foreign officials) there is now ample evidence, in the US and elsewhere (cf Italy and Australia) that Newscorp has a standard modus operandi when dealing with the 'free market'.

1. Establish leverage over politicians to change anti monopoly legislation

2. Dumping - artificially lowered prices to destroy competitors (cf News America, London Times)

3. Industrial espionage against competitors using a variety of means (Floorgraphics, Daily Mirror etc.)

For those following this story in Newscorp's home country, the US, there is now ample evidence of a sustained pattern of behavior liable to a RICO violation. My firm belief is that the heart of this problem is an abuse of power which comes from a monopoly position in cross platform ownership. It is at it's worst in Australia, only marginally better in the UK, but the US is where both the power lies, economically and politically, and where Murdoch's combination of tabloid blackmail, highly leveraged acquisitions (Miliken is a good friend of his) and ultimate commercial and political power ultimately resides. And it's only there he will be defeated.

So keep digging. Keeping on adding your own comments and sources. Just like the Wall Street occupations, this is an example whete the power elites can be held to account: by occupying their channels of communication and spin.

Originally posted at DailyKos.

Get a (Digital) Life

1995-11-30T11:59:00+00:00

The digital revolution has brought its prophets and mystics - the breathless theorizing of Wired or William Gibson’s disembodied cyberspace - but what it has so far lacked is a sober, wry, realist account. It is as though the Late Gothic Age were to be remembered solely through Acquinas’ theology or the visions of Dante, without a Chaucer or a Rabelais to chronicle carnal irreverent, everyday life.

Douglas Coupland has taken us a step closer with his new book Micoserfs - perhaps the first great work of cyberrealism.

Where others are obsessed by pixels and bits, Coupland’s subject is the ‘biomass’ squeezed between the silicon, the ‘carbon-based life forms’ that still sweat, flake away, love, grieve and fail. The novel takes the form of a diary: a young Microsoft programmer called Daniel leaves Bill Gates’ ‘campus’ and moves to Silicon Valley to form a multimedia company with a group of friends. One might suspect - from the author of Generation X - that this is just a case of trend-spotting, Coupland’s attempt to keep his finger on the pulse and count. But Microserfs is a much more unlikely and impressive feat. It begins to do for the modern information worker what Gogol’s Diary of a Madman did for the poor white collar clerks of Tsarist Russia. This is the bizarre, compelling ‘Diary of a Geek’.

The acuity of Coupland’s insights can be checked against a journalistic account of the same subject. Frank Moody’s I Sing the Body Electronic is the fruit of several years at Microsoft following the designers and developers working a children’s encyclopaedia - codenamed Sendak - a follow-up to the best-selling Encarta CD-ROM. The narrative follows the story of project management and mismanagement, overvaulting ambitions and missed deadlines. It reveals the deliberate, pressurized ‘chaos’ that has made Microsoft the most successful corporation of the last decade, and its founder, Bill Gates, the richest man in the US.

Read in close succession, real and fictitious people and incidents merge and overlap. Both books capture the strange disconnected hothouse of Microsoft’s Redmond HQ in which employees seem to spend their entire waking hours working, checking ‘Winquote’ for the latest share price and awaiting the next ‘vesting party’ where lucky stock holders cash in and leave. But money hardly seems to be the main motivation. By far the most vivid character in Moody’s book - the programmer Kevin Gammill - is straight from the pages of Coupland, playing loud grunge music, living on a diet of adrenalin and aspartame. He spends weeks locked in a dark room, looking for an errant bug some disaffected programmer has hidden in a piece of software - ‘Slayer sucks like a vacuum’. Though Gammill has earned enough stock options to retire, this just seems to drive him to spend longer at his PC, engaged in some endless quest to translate himself into binary, mortally afraid of becoming ‘non-linear’ or ‘random’. Behind Gammill floats the bespectacled prototype of Bill, the one-point-oh nerd, the original master Geek.

If Moody often reads like fiction and Coupland as journalism, it is a tribute to both books. But while I Sing the Body Electronic is an essential guide for anyone involved or interested in the new forms of production, Microserfs is indispensable to everyone involved in modern life.

The novel is more than just as study of geekonomics and geekology. The title refers to the more profound theme of how, at the micro level, we are all slaves to the information that bombards us, the codes, bugs and logic bombs that are daily soft wired into our brains. Daniel proposes calling his startup company ‘Interiority’ and as the group set about rendering the whole world in a kind of virtual lego, the hero finds his unconscious filled with Ikea furniture, Gap clothes, snatches of Bewitched, Star Trekand Roadrunner cartoons. Over the course of the book Coupland fleshes out the theory, first posited by Richard Dawkins, that cultural artefacts may use our minds in the same way genes use our bodies. The book is a hymm to the ‘meme’, the catch songs, TV programmes, brand names and slogans that colonise in our inner lives.

This is not an entirely new thought, but no one has yet applied it with such rich amusing detail to the new industries of the information revolution. And whereas a cultural critic would problably dwell on the subject with Orwellian gloom, Coupland’s is a wiser, saner view of a two-way process. Whether it is in a brilliantly dramatised ‘Venture Capital’ meeting, or the story of two bodybuilders who become Marxists (for a month), or the executive who falls in love with a she-slash-he entity on the Net, Coupland shows his characters absorbing and subverting the codes that try to swamp them. Often, he combines an essayist’s flair for ideas with a dramatist’s gift for people and situations.

Microserfs is ultimately a book of coding and forgetting and is sustained by the deeper more painful memories almost overwritten by the buzz and flux. For Daniel, this is primarily the memory of his younger brother who died at the age of 12. The boy is only mentioned a couple of times in the diary, but his absence informs everything, right down to the Daniel’s secret computer password - HELLOJED.

If, as a character in the book suggests, code is the architecture of the nineties, then Coupland shows it can be made into startling monuments, sometimes into moving epitaphs. Obsessed by the fact they are obsessed with work, his characters constantly wonder if they should ‘get a life’. But they soon return from their forays into the real world to back to their computers to transform themselves into digits to avoid decay and death. This symbiosis between Geek and Machine is not some new digital barbarism, but a version of the old transaction, made by poets and scholars, between the life than could ‘get’ now and the more prolonged versions they can communicate in paint, stone or text.

Coupland only rams his theme home in the last section of the book when Daniel’s mother suffers a stroke and can only overcome her aphasia by typing messages into a PC, and it is a rare moment of awkwardness. On the whole, Microserfs is a tough and raucous celebration of our ability to reinvent and remember ourselves. And it paints a vivid picture of the new geek priesthood, sitting like monks in the VDU lit cells, embellishing the margins with their strange hieroglyphs, keeping our culture alive.

Published in New Statesmen and Society November 1995

The View from Shakespeare Cliff

1993-05-21T11:33:00+00:00

Until a few years ago, you could be climbing any chalk down in Southern England. Trails lead up from a council estate, past a recreation ground. On the slopes above, young men with tattooed arms walk their dogs. The grass is like an old rug, woven with wild flowers, cabbage whites and meadow browns. Then the next step you take is empty air.

Few cliff tops drop away so dramatically as this corner of coast where the North Downs are truncated by the Channel. Wave erosion caught the escarpment on an upswing: the sudden panorama is enough to make the heart miss a beat. Sea-level is only some 350 feet below but you can't test the overhang. Clouds could be a few feet distant, or a few miles. Even the chalk underfoot seems to shift.

On Shakespeare Cliff, just west of Dover, vertigo has a good precedent. In October 1604, at the time Shakespeare was probably writing King Lear, his company, The King's Men, visited Dover. In the tragedy, the Earl of Gloucester, blinded for his loyalty to Lear, meets an itinerant beggar 'Poor Tom' and asks him 'Know'st the way to Dover?'.

There is a cliff whose high and bending head

Looks fearfully on the confined deep

Bring me but to the very brim of it . . .

...From that place

I shall no leading need.

What follows is one of the most resonant scenes in English Literature. Poor Tom (who is really Gloucester's estranged son Edgar in disguise) leads his father part way up the 'horrible steep', convinces him that he stands on the brink. Renouncing the world, begging forgiveness from his son, the blind man hurls himself forward to a certain death. But Gloucester is deceived. He falls forward on the grass. Returning in the guise of a local peasant, Edgar persuades Gloucester he has fallen the height of ten masts. The old man's life is a miracle. He is purged of his despair. In a single scene the cathartic power of tragedy is expressed: an imaginary fall that restores us to solid ground.

Everything in Shakespeare's description suggests that Aycliffe, renamed after dramatist at least 200 years ago, is the setting he had in mind. Given that this is a key scene in a core work of Western Literature, one might expect it would be a favoured destination on the literary trail: a locus classicus, like the Brontë's Haworth or Wordsworth's lakes. But you are unlikely to meet a cultural tourist retracing Gloucester's steps. The cliff bears no plaques to its pedigree other than its name (and a King Lear Pub in the estate behind). While every adventitious biographical trace has been themed in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Shakespeare Industry has left this monument to the dramatist's conscious poetic powers virtually untouched.

The cliff may have escaped the deadening hand of the heritage business, but it has not been forgotten by history. A few hundred yards towards Folkestone are the remains of gun-emplacement. A little further on, a vast concrete acoustic ear looks out to sea, a means of detecting incoming planes before radar was invented. Behind, a Battle of Britain monument is planned. One of the closest mainland points to France, the cliff tops are studded with relics of our ambivalence to Europe.

The cliff is riddled with symbolism. Seven thousand years ago these chalk downs were separated from France. Now powerful forces are at work again, reversing the process. It was under Shakespeare Cliff that 2000 metres were dug of the first channel tunnel in 1880. The excavations were stopped due to fears of invasion, but coal was discovered in the process; 'Shakespeare colliery' became the first in the Kent coalfield. A century on, in 1974, tunnelling began again only to be halted by the oil crisis. Today that tunnel, which connects the upper cliff with the shoreline, is used by TransManche Link, the consortium responsible for building EuroTunnel.

A heap of office blocks, cars and fencing now surrounds the old tunnel entrance, the operational headquarters for TML. At the cliff foot diggers and bulldozers, scuttling around like giant steel crustaceans, have filled an artificial lagoon with almost five million cubic metres of spoil from the excavations undersea. A mile of new coastline has emerged, bringing England 250 metres closer to France. Half the chalk slopes have been scooped away.

On this, the most precipitous of the white cliffs of Dover, it is also possible to feel a kind of cultural vertigo. A headland that figures prominently in English Literature, that protrudes deep into national legend and dream, the view from Shakespeare Cliff looks out over the fractured myth of Englishness.

Most myths are compounded of cliche and inspiration, history and deceit, and the white cliffs of Dover are no exception. Bluff and obdurate, their significance hardly needs comment: they are the face Britain presents to the world: more specifically, the face England turns towards Europe.

The white cliffs look better from a distance. Indeed, the greater the distance the better. Walter Kent, the lyricist of their most celebrated song, who improbably put 'blue birds over/The white cliffs of Dover', was an American who had not been within 3,000 miles of the place. But reality never bothered a good myth. The cliffs loom larger, whiter, and sturdier in the imagination than they do in fact.

'The eyes of homecomers thank these historical cliffs', wrote Auden in the poem Dover 1937. One might add it is not only the homesick who are grateful, the sea-sick too. My own first impression was from a storm buffeted ferry in the 70s, as it fought the waves to enter Dover harbour. For an hour or more the white chalk matched the colour of my knuckles as I tried to retain my stomach contents by gripping the deck rails. In direct contrast to Gloucester's vertiginous image, from the seaward side, the cliffs have represented stability, a fixed reference point in a shifting, reeling world.

Their whiteness is also essential. It recurs constantly in depictions of English landscape, the plain ground on which the countryside's 'greenness' can be spread. Charles Kingsley compared the cliffs the 'soft limbs of Mother Hertha' (a Germanic earth goddess), and during the Celtic revival this whiteness is often associated with native druidic purity. A crude racial metaphor is also often at work.

Others have been disappointed. Sheltering in Dover Harbour just after the sinking of the Belgrano, Jonathan Raban found the cliffs 'maculated with grime, drained of colour, under a ragged fringe of green'. The whiteness can also stand for sickliness, a pallid constitution, an atrophied state.

Above all, the cliffs form natural defences. Julius Caesar discovered as much when he first planned invasion in 55BC and remarked 'This was no place for disembarking'. By Elizabethan times it was already commonplace to describe the cliffs as England's 'bulwarks', the channel as its 'moat'. Not that nature went entirely unassisted. Dover Castle is the most blatant military complex in the area. Later, when cannons rendered the walls vulnerable, a vast submerged Grand Redoubt was constructed on the Western Heights.

But this fortress mentality also had its critics. Cobbett mocked the Grand Redoubt in his Rural Rides: 'What reason had you to suppose that the French would ever come to this hill to attack it, while the rest of the country was so much more easy to assail?' Caesar caught on quickly too, and took his invasion forces to land on the shingle beach at Walmer a few miles up the coast.

These properties converge to make the white cliffs stand out as an evocative emblem of British Resistance. Talk to local historians and they will remind you how Dover has always been a 'front line' town, suffering Dutch Merchantmen, Papist armadas, Jacobin revolutionaries and Bosch Zeppelins.

It was in the Second World War that the white cliffs reached their highest emotional pitch, and again, distance flattered their effect. In 1940 an anglophile American, Alice Duer Miller, wrote a long sentimental poem called 'The White Cliffs' as part of a concerted campaign to get America into the war. It ran to eleven editions, formed the basis of a film, and encouraged other images: Churchill standing on the cliffs looking over 'Hellfire Corner', a Lancaster limping home, a cartoon showing Hitler furiously hurling his planes against the implacable white walls. Ironically, the cliffs are made into a rallying cry by Vera Lynn just at the moment air power renders them militarily redundant. Blitzkrieg placed most English cities on the front line.

But even geology conspires with the myth. Under a powerful microscope the white chalk is comprised of the skeletons of millions of tiny coccoliths, sea creatures laid down on the seabed some 60 million years ago. It is tempting to see the white cliffs as a kind of ancestral graveyard, white with the bones of the heroic dead, a shrine to national sacrifice.

If this myth has a rival, an enemy of equal symbolic weight, a tunnel to France is the obvious candidate. The fixed link was first posited by a French Farmer in 1751 and for two hundred years since, the French have been suspiciously keen, the English paranoiacally wary. From this side of the Channel, the link has been perceived as a conduit for rabies and revolution, an act of foreign subterfuge, almost rape.

It is easy to overplay the symbolism. After all, the channel tunnel is merely a long overdue recognition of fifty years of European economic and political integration. But EuroTunnel does little to dispel the wider resonances. The very name itself, implying a tunnel to the Urals, is a grandiose gesture. Company publicity constantly talks in mythic terms of 'joining Britain to the heart of Europe', of a cultural abridgement, of overcoming 'the great divide'.

They might be right. When, by the end of this year, the first passenger service begins through the twin-bore tunnel, trains will dip underground at Santerre and emerge half an hour later north of Folkestone. Travellers will no longer hang on the horizon for the sight of white chalk, no longer suffer the turbulent currents and the relief of dry land. We are witnessing the denouement of a titanic struggle between two historic myths. In that sense, it seems only poetic justice that EuroTunnel should undermine Shakespeare Cliff.

Shakespeare's profile should be hewn into the chalk, just as American presidents are carved into Mount Rushmore. The dramatist is a key propagandist for Britain's splendid imperial isolation after Henry VIII had broken from Rome, Mary had lost Calais, and Elizabeth engaged in war with Spain. He is still a key component in the corporate image of the trading nation: Great Britain Plc. Henry V is quoted at Tory Party conferences as a rallying cry. John of Gaunt's speech (in Richard II) could form a good lyric for a second rap single from Baroness Thatcher, capitalising on her success with the Gettysburg Address:

'This other Eden, demi-paradise

This fortress built by nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house . . . '

Now the moat is broken. The fortress has been breached. There is a poetic justice - or tragic irony - to this as well. It was Margaret Thatcher who, with President Mitterand, finally signed the treaty which allowed EuroTunnel to begin. Like her other great continental initiative - the Single European Market - the project was supposed to be free trade project, to leave England's cultural identity intact. On both occasions, she now appears like Faust, conjuring with demons that would tear her apart.

Back on Shakespeare Cliff, on a clear breezy day, the misty symbolism of nationhood quickly evaporates. Look across, and there are white cliffs on the French coast too. The continent is only a day trip away.

Nevertheless, there is something distinctly English about the white cliffs. First, they are exceptionally pure, some 98% calcium carbonate. Secondly, they are surprisingly rare. There are none in Scotland or Wales: a few in France, Denmark and Germany. Such coastal chalk cliffs are only to be found in Europe, but southern England has the monopoly.

The geology of the cliffs also gives rise to another peculiarly English landscape: ancient chalk grassland. Formed when the downs were deforested by slash and burn, then grazed with sheep or cattle, the thin chalky soil does not allow any single type of vegetation to predominate. The result is a stunning diversity. On average, 30 species of flora pack every square metre of chalk: spider orchids, wild beat, wild marjoram. This has led some to call ancient chalk grassland England's equivalent to the rain forest.

Squeezed between fingers of urban Dover and an abrasive sea, a thin strip of ancient grassland persists on Shakespeare cliff. The jackdaws and the rock samphire are still here, just as Edgar describes them in King Lear. And if one had to isolate a quality that makes Shakespeare particularly English, the outcrops of patriotic bombast are beside the point. One would look for his true Englishness in the texture of his language, the mix of wildness and cultivation, roughness and delicacy, a verbal variety itself rooted in local landscapes. This is true, above all, of King Lear: the open heath in the storm, the 'poor pelting farms', the flowers with which the mad king garlands his head.

Some 80 percent of ancient chalk grassland has disappeared in the last fifty years. As Twyford Down shows, the habitat is under constant threat. Over the last year a tumultuous change has also taken place on Shakespeare Cliff, but with less publicity, even though the site also has its sacredness. The council estate has lost a dozen houses and a school - demolished. The once quiet valley now swarms with men in hard hats and florescent vests. You have to watch out for traffic when crossing over to the coastal path. If a modern day Gloucester wanted to kill himself, he'd be better off throwing himself under a passing JCB.

A great white gash, smeared by rusty bulldozer tracks currently disfigures Shakespeare cliff, has sliced it in two. Unlike the mythic battle, this devastation does not come from some external threat. It has little to do with EuroTunnel or the fixed link. TML's offices here will soon be dismantled, the site replanted with native plants. Keen to win (or buy) public opinion, EuroTunnel has sponsored numerous conservation schemes.

Our own Ministry of Transport, however, has no such qualms. Equipped with compulsory purchase orders they have bulldozed an extension of the M20 to Dover Harbour, across cliff top sites of special scientific interest, over the objections of local residents, right through the centre of Dover, severing the town from its sea promenade. All this by way of compensating the Harbour authority and the Ferry companies for any loss of trade when EuroTunnel opens. In a few months time, Shakespeare Cliff will be another noisy if spectacular motorway verge.

This is not the first time the cliff has been betrayed. 18,000 tons of gunpowder blew a large section away to make a platform for the Dover to Folkestone Railway in 1843. When it comes to undermining emblems of Englishness, we are our own worse enemies.

Yet we cling to the wreckage. Two years ago year Dover Council opened a 'White Cliffs Experience' in town: an animatronic, multi-media attraction about the 'Heritage Coast'. The so-called 'historium' recreates scenes from the Roman invasion to World War II. The ferries get a big plug, but there's no mention of Gloucester's imaginary fall. Nor is the current destruction of the clifftops touched upon. Once again, our national heritage seems to consist of elevating images while burying the facts.

Meanwhile, if you want the 'Gloucester Experience' there is still a little time left to climb the real Shakespeare cliff. Looking over the brim, you may recall how a blind man found his feet by a leap of faith. Or perhaps you will remember the story of Lear, a tyrannical old English King, who only awoke from his madness when his daughter arrived here with liberating forces from France. Or you might just listen out for the sea quietly milling the shingle, before the cars drown it out for ever.

Published in the Independent on Sunday May 1993

FALL OF THE HOUSE OF MURDOCH XXIII: Bernstein on Murdoch and Nixon: Floorgraphics Smoking Gun

2011-09-29T16:59:32+00:00

Bernstein on the Watergate Analogy and the Culture of Lawlessness

If you think the Watergate analogy is hyperbolical or fanciful, don't forget it was first made by Carl Bernstein himself in The Daily Beast nearly three months ago

The circumstances of the alleged lawbreaking within News Corp. suggest more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon presiding over a criminal conspiracy in which he insulated himself from specific knowledge of numerous individual criminal acts while being himself responsible for and authorizing general policies that routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct. Not to mention his role in the cover-up. It will remain for British authorities and, presumably, disgusted and/or legally squeezed News Corp. executives and editors to reveal exactly where the rot came from at News of the World, and whether Rupert Murdoch enabled, approved, or opposed the obvious corruption that infected his underlings.

And here he is, in a Guardian interview today where he makes the same point

The parallels with Watergate... Had to do with the culture itself that made this possible. In the Nixon Whitehouse Nixon was responsible for the sensibility that permeated the place, that had to do with unconstitutional acts with a cynicism about the political process and how it was practised, and a disregard for the law. And it became apparent to me, as I read more and more what was happening here, that really at bottom what this hacking furore is about, {jb_quoteleft}it's about a culture in the newsroom that has nothing to do with real journalism, real reporting (which is very simply put the best obtainable version of the truth){/jb_quoteleft} but rather has to do with serving up both the lowest common denominator of information and calling it news, and obtaining it through a methodology which is outrageous, whether you're talking about hacking or other kinds of invasions of privacy, and that the atmosphere in that newsroom is a product of the culture that Murdoch in the News of the World .

I've always said that Murdoch's Wizard of Oz like appearance before the House of Commons Select Committee this summer - the first time the most powerful man in my country had faced the people's elected representatives - was the crucial moment. Murdoch ruled by fear, by politicians self censoring and second guessing his movements. The revelation that he was a rather frail crank oldy man suddenly undermined the fear, and frankly did much to diminish his effective power. As Bernstein says:

I think his power as it were is diminished, because I don't think he's held - as a result of what we've heard and seen - in the same kind of awe by both his peers and those who feared. At the same time I think it's a mistake to oversimplify any of this. Is his power over? Is he all good or all bad. I think that's much too simple.

Let me state for the record. I have no personal opinions of Rupert himself. I've never met him. I've heard he can be a deeply loyal father and boss. However, the empire he has accumulated , the modal monopoly it deployed to create a 'market in news' which was corrupt, was used to game legislation, blackmail politicians, intimidate opponents and destroy the lives of innocent people through tabloid exposure using illegal mean...

That was unequivocally bad, and we should keep campaigning for that empire to be dismantled.

Quiet Intensity: The Raft of Ongoing Investigations

So, while things may seem to be quiet on the Murdoch scandal front, but with three police investigations ongoing in the UK (into phone hacking, computer hacking and payments to police), a public inquiry and two parliamentary committees, it won't stay like that for long in the UK. Like all criminal scandals, the onus on investigators is to compile evidence - and much more is coming to light.

Just this week it's been revealed the James Murdoch's senior PR advisor has resigned: one of the arrested journalists is joining Andy Coulson in suing News International; continued threats to Tom Watson who tirelessly campaigned on this issue in Parliament, the revelation of 11 million emails, and details of illegal practices in other Murdoch tabloid titles, apart from the now defunct News of the World.

So the culture Bernstein talked about extended to Murdoch's other titles. What is the chance it didn't extend to the US too?

Ad has been diaried before, there are now three prongs to the ongoing DOJ investigation into Newscorp: the most salient being the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (it's illegal to bribe foreign officials as Newscorp seems to have done with British police officers), rumours still of hacking victims on US soil, and by far the least known, but potentially the most deadly, an investigation into an old anti-trust suit from a few years ago, the Floorgraphics case, which could leave Newscorp vulnerable to RICO statutes.

U.S. investigators are looking into potential antitrust activities of Murdoch's News America Marketing Group, which specializes in producing in-store ads, coupons, advertising inserts and other promotional materials for supermarkets and retail outlets worldwide.
Investigators reportedly are seeking documents relating to a 2009 trial of a suit against News America by a New Jersey advertising company, Floorgraphics, which had accused News America of, among other things, hacking into its computer systems and lying to its customers. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum, and News America subsequently acquired Floorgraphics.

All told, News America has shelled out $655 million to settle suits against competitors alleging unsavory business practices.

As Crains put it two days ago (hat tip to the ever watchful Ceebs)

Investigations of News Corp.'s illegal conduct initially involved just News of the World, which represented only 1% of annual revenue for the New York-based media company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal and operator of the Fox television networks.

The marketing unit, which promotes products through supermarket coupons, accounted for four times that revenue and about 12% of profit for fiscal 2011.

Rivals of News America Marketing have claimed in court papers that it prospered by violating antitrust laws. It also hacked into a Floorgraphics password-protected website, one of its own lawyers told the jury at the 2009 trial.

“There is a pattern of anticompetitive behavior by News Corp.,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. “We've seen it in Britain, and we've seen it in America.”

Remember, News America Marketing provides 12% of Newscorp profits. That's a really compared with the 1% provided by the biggest English language paper, the News of the World, before it was closed.

So though it seems quiet, that doesn't mean a lot isn't going on under the surface. Indeed the 'unnamed source' regularly talking about Newscorp affairs is either a whistleblower, or some desperate damage limitation..

Remember all the Presidents Men? The movie ends with Bernstein and Woodward filing more stories: it took two years before Nixon resigned, and another year or two after that for the final criminal indictments to be handed down.

Don't despair: watch this space

Originally posted on DailyKos