10/2/2017
“We live in a free market”, “the markets decide our future”, “let the market decide”, “it’s a free market economy”.
Have you read anything along those lines recently? Chances are you have but unless you are an economist or a person who follows these things closely, there is also a good chance that you believe we do live in that Free Market Economy.
Belief in “Free Markets” will go down in history as one of the Top 10 lies that have been deliberately told, and in 2017, its being told to the population of the entire world. Such is the power of modern communications. A lie told in Australia at 12 noon, will be around the planet and arriving back in Australia within 24 hours.
How news spreads so rapidly is what this is all about, don’t we owe ourselves a deeper look into the subject if it’s so important?
In a UK Newspaper today there was an article about the presence of Rupert Murdoch at a meeting between the newly elected POTUS, Donald Trump, and Michael Gove, Ex politician turned Reporter for the Murdoch empire, and it was not reported at all at the time some days ago.
Under the article was an exchange of comments, and I have copied a small selection here, minus ID,
“Dacre, Murdoch etc. are scum, but they are not evil influencers, they are not “making” people think this way, they are just giving them what they already want to hear – that is the scary thing.”
“… the Murdoch empire, the backchannel to right wing politicians?”
“Oh I think the consumer played the larger part in what happened with the phone tapping scandal…Their demand is what drove supply.”
“…Lefties are so paranoid about Rupert. Get a life guys, other than he thinks left wing policies are bullshit he’s just not that into you.”
The trend in these comments seems to be saying that Rupert Murdoch’s powerful position as owner of News International, and the TV stations and newspapers, and the influence he has on the world is OUR fault, because we buy his stuff and it’s a Free Market.
It was us, the people, who marched on Murdoch premises all those years ago, screaming “Give us the boobs Rupe”, “Give us a daily dose of Flesh, Fags and Fosters mate” and, of course, Mr Murdoch drew his advisors together and commanded them to give the public what they had been demanding, and lo, The SUN came up and was greeted with cheering throughout Britain.
I understand that the day the Sun was first published has been declared a public holiday, (or so I read in the Daily Mail.)
It is the same rubbish we are told by the food industry, that the factory farming of animals and use of plastic packaging by supermarkets is “what the housewife wants”, when it is no such thing, it is what the Industry supplies us. And I find it offensive that the argument is reversed in this way.
The Murdoch empire, like all modern multi-national corporations, exists solely to make profits exclusively for its management team and its shareholders, employees have been phased out of the equation for over 40 years, while the tiny proportion executives and shareholders make off with the loot. The vast profits thus generated provide political power which is used as a tool to help them generate yet more profit creates yet more power, and even richer elites.
Murdoch has manipulated politicians in the UK for years, but he is not really a political animal, he just smooches up to leaders of all parties because he just wants more profits and more power and just rinse and repeat.
News International and 20th Century Fox have been trying to get this power and control mechanism installed in Europe for a couple of decades, because it’s a huge market with vast profits and advertising revenues to be made. Murdoch isn’t interested in bringing quality news and culture to the European market, and the Europeans are not too fond of Rupert Murdoch for they see him for what he really is, a megalomaniac bent on wealth creation for himself.
I am sure there are also plenty of robber barons in Europe, but none like Murdoch, and there some extremely good sources of news already in place with the level of journalism much higher than the UK standard and much more accountable to the public. UK standards are lower now than I have ever seen before in the last 50 years. (When Al Jazeera and Russia Today overtake the BBC as a supplier of reliable news then you know we have a problem)
Of course, being rejected by Europe is a like red rag to a bull for Murdoch, people of his temperament “don’t do defeat” whether lying down or standing up.
A while back, a Murdoch (News)paper, the News of the World, was in trouble over the phone hacking scandal and it ended up in court. That came as a blow to them at that particular time because Murdoch was planning to take over control of SKY TV, not just for political clout, but also the billions to be made in Advertising revenue. It is also possible that with SKY TV reaching out all over Europe at the time, Murdoch might have had the idea that this was a way into the biggest political market too, expanding his sphere of influence along with his massive ego.
He got a bollocking from the Courts about bugging peoples phones, and had to wind his neck in, having to close down the News of the World as a result. Luckily, it wasn’t making him much money at that time, but what really pissed him off was that the high level nature of his court appearance and his badly dented reputation, made it a really bad time to ask for a green light from the Regulators for his expansionist plans into the TV business.
Don’t forget now, that this is all OUR fault, with the Free Market economy, and Rupert, were just trying to give us what we wanted. It was us, the public, that demanded he tap the phones of the rich and famous because of our insatiable desire for cheap gossip, and by Golly he would risk everything, even his reputation, to give us what we wanted………. right Rupe?
Now let’s jump forward a decade or so,
To the divorce between the UK and the EU, AKA Brexit. It was a very close run referendum; it could have gone either way. To an often jilted lover, a man scorned by a woman, especially one standing in the way of filling his Cayman Island bank account, something had to be done. A shove, a gentle push in a given direction, off the cliff, an electric fire dropped into the bath? What could Rupert do to open up his democratic path on the quest for more wealth and power, he must have been deep in thought when………..
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, there sprung a miraculous “Leak”. HRH The Queen wanted Brexit. The SUN was shining and the Gods were smiling on him that day. What a surprise, it was a miracle, it was almost as if somebody had planned the whole thing.
Of course it was vehemently denied by the Queens representatives who lodged a complaint with the Regulator, which was upheld, but how do you un-see a headline claiming the “Queen wants Brexit!”
One tiny minority in favour of leaving…delivered as ordered, against all odds, as if by magic!
Honour is satisfied too, Murdoch sure showed those Europeans a thing or two {and gave them a taste of their future at the same time}. A few months later, 20th Century Fox, part of the Murdoch empire and run by his son, pops up with a bid, gently floated in, for nigh on £12Bn, for the purchase of the remaining chunk of SKY TV, by now even bigger than the last time we spoke about it.
Note: -Murdoch already controlled 39% of SKY even before this bid.
This is how corporatism works, it requires mystery and intrigue, and a fanatical will to absorb as much money as is possible, and it really doesn’t matter how it’s done, because the ends always justify the means when there is a pot of gold on offer.
“We live in an over regulated economy”, bleat the poor billionaires, failing to see the irony of the bollocks they speak. You can’t have it Overregulated AND claim it’s a Free Market, but somehow large numbers of us just don’t see it that way yet. It is NOT our stupidity, nor is it our fault that this lie is accepted into the Law of Economics.
The clue is in the simple fact that early in 2017 you would think the UK and US populations were engaged in a civil war over the issues surrounding Donald Trump and the European Union. Families are divided and tempers are running very high in some areas. Have we forgotten that old Divide and Rule strategy the Romans gave us? We absolute have PROOF that its working now on more people and even better than it did 2000 years ago. It suits the rich and the elite to have us fight each other it is exactly what they want, and they do not give a shit how many of us get killed in the process because the biggest source the Elite have ever had, is War. Is it then a coincidence that US troops have built a ring around China, that N Korea and Iran are now help up as “The Enemy”.
The recent John Pilger film entitled “The Coming war on China” is a must see if you find what I am saying is too farfetched, and if “They couldn’t influence me” is your position on this, just pause a moment to think about how much there is “out there” that has an influence on you, every single waking moment of your life.
Advertising is just the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a very big iceberg. It is everywhere, on every screen, in every radio broadcast and across trillions of webpages. When the efforts you must make to avoid advertising is hardly worth the time needed to block and install the software/delete the app/tear up the free newspapers and switch channels, then advertising probably went too far. In a 60-minute period on most TV channels you get about 50% ad free if you are lucky. We are so deeply awash with this s**t, that our brains have become pickled in “messages from our sponsor”.
And while we are awash, like it or not, we actually absorb some of it, and little by little it inserts itself in our heads and we barely realise its happening.
Almost everything now is designed to get you to think a certain way, and this isn’t just about consumer culture, it’s about the way we think of other people, do we care about them or do we just want Money, a happy life for our children, a bigger car, a better environment? Do we want fame and fortune?
Beware of the things you are told by Billionaires. If we are so overregulated how is it that they managed to get all of that money, and how much money would they have now if we took all the rules away then?
Now we arrive at the time where the Regulator (a Regulator that has had its rules “changed” recently) is supposed to rule on whether the Murdoch TV Merger “is in the public interest”. It’s all gone very quiet, which makes me worry that it will be snuck through the back door, let’s face it, that sort of stuff is commonplace now. It is not in the public interest to have one person controlling News outlets worldwide, and it frankly doesn’t matter if it’s Murdoch or Mother Theresa. When this amount of power reaches a single pair of hands it inevitably is abused.
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” so said Lord Acton a couple of hundred years ago, but somehow it’s no longer trendy to finish the quotation off properly with the last line which runs “Great men are almost always bad men”
If you need further proof of Murdoch’s singlemindedness in his wheelings and dealings, give it the sniff test, why should we feel he is politically motivated? He has a lousy set of ethics, almost no scruples, and very little in the way of morals, so why would he give a shit about people, or anybody but himself?
Anyway, I digress, let us get back to the “Free Market” we think we have but haven’t, do you remember LIBOR? It’s an exchange rates and “fixing rates of interest”, a quick dabble in Google gives: –
“LIBOR is the average interbank interest rate at which a selection of banks on the London money market are prepared to lend to one another. LIBOR comes in 7 maturities (from overnight to 12 months) and in 5 different currencies”. So we have a Free Market economy where stuff like interest rates just responds to the market but also needs a little help from a Trillion-dollar banking industry who sit behind closed doors and “Adjust” things so that they work, err Freely? Of course those adjustments will have selflessly been made in favour of society at large and there isn’t a sniff of these people making loadsaamoney and trousering million dollar bonuses. Yeah Right!
More importantly, how free is the system in the hands of Big Bankers? Not Very, the system was massively abused from 2005 on, and while creating enormous wealth for a handful, it contributed massively to the financial crash of 2008.
This is what the Free market economy is really all about, it’s a Free-For-All market where the rich get richer at everyone else’s expense, and that is even BEFORE we add Fraud and Corruption into the mix.
BTW, on the subject of Advertising, I just read in today’s paper that …
“British households borrowed a record £31.6bn in 2016 to buy cars, up 12% on the year before”
It’s in an article that claims that this level of personal debt could actually trigger a financial crash all on its own. Who says that Advertising doesn’t pay? If it didn’t pay it wouldn’t work, and if it didn’t work, how the hell did we sleepwalk into £32Bn of highly dangerous Free Market debt
Just imagine then an economy that wasn’t a Free Market, one that had some general rules of decency and honesty, one that cold shouldered gossip bare boobs and tales told out of school, what would life be like then?
Bloody hell people might feel they must resort to reading books for goodness sake, or having meaningful conversations with each other, I mean what sort of a world are we trying to create here? Some bloody state where people are supposed to know stuff and forced to read books, hell that’s trampling all over our basic human rights, thank f**k we have Rupert Murdoch to save us from the nightmare eh?
I don’t think it’s an outrageous suggestion that the Labour Party and other institutions of the Labour movement have some kind of a ‘duty of care’ for it’s members. I’m also going to suggest that, as a movement, we have a moral duty to protect, defend and support those who are picked off, bullied and witch-hunted, irrespective of the finer details of any disagreements we might have with them. Recently, one of the members of our Red Labour group has had their suspension rescinded, without an apology or explanation. We’ve seen the Labour members in Wallasey exonerated and countless examples of members who have had no information on their exclusions and suspensions, who have spent months in limbo. Some have even become notorious by their suspensions. I’m thinking of friends who have been abused in the street, shouted and spat at, have had lies told about them in the local…
anicebusinesstodopeoplewith 