“Indifference To Human Dignity”: Finally, Rupert Murdoch Gets His Due
So here’s the synopsis of my forthcoming exposé emulating Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop.” I conceived it during an email exchange with a French friend who’s an expert on the British satirist.
The working title is “Scantily Clad.”
A tabloid newspaper hires buxom ladies to “have it off,” as the Brits say, with politicians, celebrities, members of the royal family and the Manchester United Football Club. Once done, the editors hire a hitman to kill them off, and a psychic to help Scotland Yard find the bodies — preferably naked in luxury hotel suites or stately country homes with riding stables and formal gardens.
Is there a serial killer among the aristocrats? Millions of yobbos (working-class folks) demand to know. Enter an intrepid French politician with a hyphenated name to expose the plot by exposing himself to a buxom hotel maid dispatched by the Daily Wank to seduce him…
OK, that’s enough. Even if I could write fiction, I couldn’t write British fiction. Besides, satire depends upon comic exaggeration, while the deepening scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s News International corporation has far surpassed my puerile imaginings.
After all, prostitutes get bumped off every day in this fallen world. For a newspaper to exploit the families of kidnapped 13-year-old girls, the victims of terrorist attacks, and the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, implies an indifference to human dignity that can only be described as depraved. All that and more was apparently done by Murdoch’s now-defunct News of the World.
News International shuttered the weekly tabloid in a transparent attempt to pretend that executives have been shocked by the transgressions of overzealous staffers.
Meanwhile, the Sun, Murdoch’s other London tabloid, obtained the medical records of then Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s 4-month-old son. Brown said that he and his wife were “in tears” on learning that their infant’s cystic fibrosis would decorate the newspaper’s front page.
Brown has accused another Murdoch newspaper, the allegedly respectable Sunday Times, of hiring “known criminals” to rummage through his bank accounts, legal records and tax returns.
“If I,” Brown has said, “with all the protection and all the defenses and all the security that a chancellor of the Exchequer or a prime minister, am so vulnerable to unscrupulous tactics, to unlawful tactics, methods that have been used in the way we have found, what about the ordinary citizen?”
So that’s lesson one. Privacy in the digital age no longer exists. The more fortunate or, in the case of victims of terrorism or tragedy, the more unfortunate you are, the more your intimate sins and sorrows will be merchandised as infotainment for the rabble.
Perhaps British audiences titillated to hear of Prince Charles’ wish to become a tampon shouldn’t be so horrified to see innocent crime victims treated as rudely as philandering aristocrats.
After all, Murdoch’s minions may have rationalized, what does it matter why somebody’s famous? Fame has no rights.
Even more than his fiercely competitive business practices, it’s Murdoch’s unsparingly cynical view of human nature that’s made him the most powerful media mogul in the world. Mass audiences respond to voyeurism: sex, violence, personal tragedy, and racial and political melodrama. And in Great Britain particularly, people yearn to see the mighty humiliated.
Nevertheless, the British are horrified. They’re outraged about journalists bribing cops, about interfering in murder investigations, about identity theft, and about hacking thousands of cellphones, even as News International executives assured Parliament that a handful of rogue employees were involved. (News flash: Newspaper staffers can’t authorize six-figure payoffs.)
Murdoch’s coziness with Tory and Labour politicians alike has become a problem for him and them. See, something else people love is the vicarious pleasure of watching a coverup come undone. News International big shots are face cards, too. Prominent careers will be ruined; powerful people are going to prison.
Meanwhile, notice how studiously everybody in the United States is concentrating on the purely British aspects of the scandal? Murdoch’s ruthless; he gets even. Besides, a person could end up working for him.
However, cracks have developed in the transatlantic wall. Already, a former New York cop has said News of the World offered him cash to hack the cells of the 9/11 dead. Les Hinton, the longtime aide that Murdoch placed in charge of the Wall Street Journal, is among those who gave now-inoperative testimony to Parliament in 2007. One bad apple, he said.
Even Roger Cohen, for my money the New York Times’ best columnist, defends Murdoch’s “visionary, risk-taking determination” even as he deplores the influence of his biggest moneymaker, Fox News. “[With] its shrill right-wing demagoguery masquerading as news,” he writes, “[Fox has] made a significant contribution to the polarization of American politics, the erosion of reasoned debate, the debunking of reason itself, and the ensuing Washington paralysis.”
Apart from having the moral imagination of a water moccasin, in other words, Rupert Murdoch’s just a terrific guy.
By: Gene Lyons, Columnist, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, published in Salon, July 13, 2011
Why The GOP’s ‘Job Creators’ Are Hard to Find
If you’re a “job creator,” raise your hand. It would be nice to know who you are, exactly.
Republicans negotiating with President Obama over a fix for the nation’s debt problems have been rolling out the heavy buzzwords lately, and there must have been a fresh memo about the sonorous ring of “job creators.” House Speaker John Boehner repeatedly decries tax hikes on job creators, with congressional colleagues such as Paul Ryan and Jeb Hensarling forming a job-creators chorus behind him. House Republicans recently published a “Plan for America’s Job Creators” (but not for everybody else, presumably) and if you’re an aggrieved job creator, you can let House Majority Leader Eric Cantor know what’s bugging you by filling out a brief form at http://jobs.majorityleader.gov/.
The trouble is, job creators are an endangered species these days. The biggest problem in the U.S. economy, in fact, is a shortage of job creators to reward and protect. Companies are barely hiring, and there are about 7 million fewer jobs now than there were at the end of 2007, when the Great Recession began. Part of the Republicans’ plan is to lower taxes, streamline regulation, open more trade and take other steps that will stimulate job creation. But we’ve already tried some of that, including several rounds of tax cuts since 2008. Most job creators are still hiding.
Big companies employ a lot of Americans, but over the last few years they’ve been better at job destruction than job creation. Between 2007 and 2010, companies with more than 1,000 employees shed about 2.6 million jobs, according to the latest data from the Labor Department. Many big companies have rebounded sharply from the recession, with impressive profits and a lot of cash on hand. But even some of the most successful big companies aren’t doing much job creation–not in the United States, anyway. Here are a few examples:
General Electric, which is run by the same Jeffrey Immelt who chairs President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, axed 32,000 jobs worldwide between 2007 and 2010, according to information from GE’s annual reports. About 22,000 of those lost jobs were in the United States. No job creation there, even though GE earned about $12 billion in profits in 2010.
Exxon Mobil has added about 2,800 jobs worldwide since 2007, but the giant oil firm doesn’t break out how many of those new hires work in the United States. Since Exxon earns nearly 70 percent of its revenue from overseas, it’s a good bet that’s where most of the new jobs are, too.
Wal-Mart has added about 40,000 jobs in the United States since 2007, largely because the discount retailer has been a beneficiary of pinched consumers desperate to save money. But it has added about 150,000 jobs overseas during the same time–nearly four times the U.S. tally. Still, Wal-Mart seems to be one company that can legitimately call itself a job creator.
IBM has added about 40,000 employees since 2007, but like Exxon, it doesn’t say where. About 65 percent of IBM’s revenue comes from abroad, and that’s where almost all of its revenue growth has come from since 2007. IBM’s U.S. business is actually down from 2007 levels, so it’s possible that most or all of IBM’s new hires have been overseas.
Big companies, in fact, aren’t considered a big source of new jobs. While they generate a lot of profits, they also tend to be mature enterprises more likely to swallow other companies and consolidate market share, which tends to eliminate jobs, not create them. “It’s the job of big firms to shed jobs,” says Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffmann Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship. “Big firms want to lower costs, which means lowering labor costs.”
Young firms, Schramm says, account for virtually all net job creation in the U.S. economy over the last 30 years. That’s because startups that survive their first couple of years tend to be vibrant, fast-growing companies that create new industries and hire a lot of new workers. Think Microsoft and Oracle in the 1980s, and Amazon, eBay, and Google in the 1990s. Today, new technology-based firms like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga, and LinkedIn represent one of the fastest-growing sectors of the U.S. economy. However, they’re the last companies that need any kind of tax relief–and they’re not about to ask for special treatment from Washington, either. They became transformative companies without Washington’s help, and they’d like to keep it that way.
Politicians routinely extol the virtues of “small business,” but that’s not really where the job creators are, either. Conventional small businesses–dry cleaners, nail salons, delicatessens, independent professionals like lawyers and doctors–tend to be important pillars of their communities, but they also come and go without generating a lot of new jobs, on balance. During the third quarter of 2010 (the most recent quarter for which there’s data), firms with fewer than 20 employees eliminated 34,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department. The biggest gains were among firms with 500 to 999 employees, which created 37,000 jobs.
So if Republicans want to modify the tax code to reward and encourage job creators, they need to come up with a scheme that offers the lowest tax rates to fast-growing startups, some medium-sized firms, and a few select multinationals. Of course, they might prefer to lower taxes on everybody who could be a job creator–because that includes almost everybody. If you ever spend money, that makes you a job creator, in the most expansive sense of the phrase, since somebody gets paid to provide whatever you buy. But then we’d have to figure out whether to reward American consumers for helping create jobs in China, Japan, Sri Lanka, or wherever the imported goods they purchase come from, or to reward people who spend money that helps create American jobs. So if you buy a Lexus made in Japan or Gucci loafers made in Italy, you’re not really a creator of American jobs and you shouldn’t be eligible for favorable tax treatement. But if you have your kitchen remodeled by a local contractor or go to a chiropractor for back pain, you qualify. It’s not so easy being a job creator. Or locating one.
By: Rick Newman, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
Ruling: No Corporate Donations For Russell Pearce In Arizona Recall Election
Senate President Russell Pearce will not be able to get financial help from corporations to keep him in office, at least not directly.
In a formal legal opinion, state Solicitor General David Cole rejected the contention of Lisa Hauser, an attorney who represents Pearce, that the prohibition on those donations that applies in regular candidate races is inapplicable in recall elections.
Cole said the law is clear that neither corporations nor unions can make contributions designed to “influence an election.’’ And he said a bid to oust a sitting legislator from office fits that definition.
Cole wrote the decision rather than Attorney General Tom Horne, who had recused himself because of his political ties to Pearce.
Under Arizona law, a formal opinion from the Attorney General’s Office can be cited as legal precedent, much like a court ruling. The fact that this opinion was signed by Cole and not Horne does not change that.
Hauser said a campaign committee formed to aid Pearce had accepted a small corporate check — she said it was about $1,200 —but returned it when state Elections Director Amy Bjelland questioned the legality of the move. It was Hauser who then sought the formal opinion.
“If that’s the AG’s opinion, unless we go to court to change it, it is what it is,’’ she said. But Hauser said that is unlikely to happen.
If nothing else, she said, the opinion clarifies that corporate and union money will be off limits not only to Pearce but to anyone who decides to run against him.
“We just want to make sure everybody’s playing by the same set of rules,’’ Hauser said.
But Cole pointed out there is a loophole of sorts in the law.
He noted that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that corporations and unions have some of the same free-speech rights as individuals. While that does not disturb state or federal laws prohibiting contributions directly to candidates, there can be no laws which bar either type of organizations from forming or contributing to separate efforts to elect or defeat any particular candidate.
The only requirement is that these committees be completely independent of — and have no connection of any sort to — the candidate.
Randy Parraz, one of the recall organizers, said his committee has not accepted either corporate or union money. But Parraz will not disclose who paid for the successful petition drive, at least not yet.
“A lot of this has to do with people’s fear,’’ he said, intimating that those who helped with the recall might be the subject of some sort of unspecified retaliation. He said some people gave just $25 because the sources of contributions at that level and below do not need to be detailed.
“We’re going to comply,’’ he said. “We don’t feel compelled to have to disclose at this point.’’
Bjelland confirmed that for this unusual election — the first ever for a statewide or legislative office — the first campaign finance reports do not have to be filed until Oct. 27. That is only two weeks before the vote.
In a separate event Monday, Parraz attempted to deliver a letter to Pearce at his Senate office asking him to resign.
That is one option he has under state recall laws. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors would then choose a replacement.
But Pearce said he has no intention of quitting and believes he will win the recall and be able to serve out the balance of his two-year term.
By: Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services, Published in East Valley Tribune.com, July 12, 2011
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