Tag Archives: Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch mistaken for Mr. Burns and pied by Jonnie “Marbles” Marbles

Unseen, Rupert Murdoch Sr. receiving shaving cream pie to the face. “It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat“
–tweeted by activist/comedian Jonnie Marbles, immediately before pie-ing News Corp godfather Rupert Murdoch at UK parliamentary hearing. Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng reached over their bodyguard to strike Mr. Marbles, and curiously, hearing room cameras cut all direct images of the spectacle. Watching Murdoch deny knowledge or curiosity about NOTW wrongdoings, you wonder how word even reached him that his presence was requested at this parliamentary inquiry.

I’m thinking the PR coaching the Murdochs received is being overrated. Pretend to be a hands-off boss so not to expose your wrists to be slapped in cuffs? No one was buying Murdoch the Elder’s senility schtick, until the media began its spin, and wasn’t it amazing to gaze upon the breadth of media fealty shown to Rupert? Everyone wanted to distance themselves from Braveheart Marbles, because he purportedly threw audience sympathy to Murdoch. Right. The only ones fooled are those shills pretending. The world TV audience saw Murdoch for what they know he is, a blackmailer of world leaders, pursuing the ugliest of neoliberal war-making agendas.

Of course Rupert’s media was going to praise the Missus for her flying-clawing attack of the pie-wielding Marbles. It wasn’t intervention mind you, but retaliatory. I hope he can sue her. He’d already done the pie and was being subdued, she leaped over security to have at him.

Did Marbles spoil the show? Nonsense. He waited until the last of the softball questions, and took his turn. The parliamentarians may have been setting technical legal snares to trap the Murdochs at a later date, but certainly they could also have been asking, for example, did Murdoch wonder how the NOTW obtained confidential information, and was any ever withheld because it would lead others to question its illegal source. Also, did Murdoch ever use the threat of releasing confidential information to leverage government policy in his favor?

The big story for me was how the camera feed cleverly cut away from Marbles’ stunt. Ostensibly to capture the action suddenly coming from off-camera, but ultimately censoring the main scene. Where were the multitude of stills from that moment, of Elder Murdoch’s face filled with pie? Images abound now of the pie-wielder, caught effectively with egg-white on his face, but of Murdoch, not even a smudge, his splattered jacket whisked out of view before the frontal camera feed was let to resume.

How that sequence was managed for Murdoch tells a lot I think about the power he wields. Similar to the aftermath of the murdered girl’s violated voicemail. As the story broke, it wasn’t just messages erased, but internet caches of the early evidence, effaced even from hacktivists who know how to rescue unarchived data. Tracks of NOTW malfeasance erased by malfeasance at a much higher pay grade.

But I celebrate Jonnie Marbles, aka Jonathan May-Bowles, for daring something even the most powerful men in the world dare not, to humiliate Rupert Murdoch, on live TV with a world audience no less. It was a feat worthy of the shoe thrower, and no less deserved. I only hope the price Marples may have to pay, isn’t the fate of Sean Hoare, an earlier source of ire for Murdoch Elder.

I celebrate Jonnie Marbles’ last tweets before his deed:

I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.

RT @RachelvsPublic: Have you ever wondered what a verbal sudoku would be like to solve? This is it. #Hackgate #Yates

One gets the sense that they haven’t really done the required reading ahead of their presentation. Think they may fail this module #hackgate

It might be quicker if Baby Murdoch simply listed all of the things that he does know #hackgate

It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat

UPDATE: The Guardian gave Jonnie Marbles a chance to explain his stunt. He’s taking a beating in the comments, but here’s my favorite:

At last we have someone in this whole sorry mess who can own up and take responsibility for their own actions.

If the Murdochs had thrown a pie at Johnnie the article would read :

I never threw that pie. I was not in the position at the time to throw that pie.?

I don’t remember that pie, I throw 56,000 pies every day, how I am supposed to remember one individual pie??

If a pie was thrown, then someone I trusted must have thrown that pie.?

With hindsight I never threw the pie but if I had thrown the pie it was a mistake and I will apologise once all the facts are known about the pie and if I really threw it or not.?

This is the most humble pie day of my life.

Cheer up Johnnie.

News of the World crimes belong to Rupert Murdoch, News Corp, Fox News, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal

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The issue of Rupert Murdoch’s lawless news empire isn’t about phone hacking to break news, it’s about surveillance used for the same purposes as intelligence agencies, to control political climates, to effect outcomes based on what you have on the players. Does the FBI have to find evidence of malfeasance in the US to make Murdoch any less guilty? The important point to make is that News Of The World, is News Corp, is Rupert Murdoch, is News International, is Fox, is Dow Jones, is the Wall Street Journal. With the WSJ, Murdoch’s sway over the stock market may mean he dictates the editorial voice of all corporate media properties. Anyway, who can pretend the corporate kleptocracy isn’t a shared agenda? Murdoch may be just one rotten apple, but now everyone can see how rotten. Here’s a chance to wash him out.

If the ‘Left’ is serious about doing something credible to counteract the capitalist class, now is the time. Do the work of informing the public on how News Corp has been twisting the truth not just to sell papers and floor wax, but to promote an agenda of limitless greed at the expense of working and poor people. In reality, Rupert Murdoch is just one cog in a very large propaganda machine, but he is a significant dynamic that binds the corporatists and political right-wing together. Telling the plain truth about Murdoch at this time is the best weapon progressives have at their disposal.

— The Angry Indian

The Census and Original Intent of the Founding Aristocrats

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Since we have a lot of loudmouth Know-it-all know-nothings running their collective head, in chorus, paid by the richest men in America to cement the notion of an American Aristocracy based on personal wealth,
Who tell us every hour of every day that they, and ONLY They, know the original intent of a group of arbitrarily assigned White Aristocrats they call the “Founding Fathers”, a group which includes up to … actually less than, 100 of the richest men in America.
Out of the 3,929,326 MEN and only MEN counted in the first census in 1790. Never mind that even the very tiny INSIGNIFICANT representative sample they define as the “Founding Fathers” never unanimously agreed on any single issue, and that John Adams, one of the Richest of the bunch, granted himself arbitrary powers in a definition of the Sedition Acts to jail people who disagreed with his personal agenda. Or that there wasn’t a Majority Consensus on the Bill of Rights, which wasn’t included in the Original Constitution. Or that of those 3,929,326 MEN more than half weren’t allowed to VOTE for who got to represent them… No Taxation without representation? How about “No REPRESENTATIVE DICTATORSHIP without Representation”?
Their “original intent” is considered irrelevant by the Pompous Ass Pseudo-Intellectuals who are trying to force their Elitist (just not actually “elite”) agenda on the rest of us.

What of the OTHERS who had to bear the burdens of the conflicted and contradictory mandates from the Tiny Minority Even Of The Landed Aristocracy who are arbitrarily assigned the title “Founding Fathers” but not only weren’t given the Vote, they weren’t even COUNTED. Women, Children, Bonded (slavery through debt) and people Born Slaves weren’t counted. Nor were the Native Americans in the territories claimed by the White Aristocratic Tiny Minority. Actually, slaves were counted as “Property” not as human population.

Wonderful group of Role Models you Right Wing Extremists have there. In 1860 American Indians were counted, but only those who had “renounced” tribal affiliations, and of course, the sovereignty CONSTITUTIONALLY defined by Treaty (Article VI) which was recognized on paper but virtually never at gunpoint.

Nor were these Americans who had given up their tribal rights accorded any citizenship rights until 1911, more than a half century later.
The United States in 1790 consisted of the 13 original states and the territories that later became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Notice that save for Maine and Vermont, (two French words actually) the other territories have American Indian names. There’s a reason for that. Actually “Indiana” was designated as an entirely Indian territory, hence the name.

Then number of American Indians IN WHAT WAS THE UNITED STATES at the time was far greater than the number of those Americans counted as “citizens” and a HUGE difference between their population and the fewer than 100 Rich Bitches who are said to be the Last and Only deciders of American Law.

So, are we to join their Rush to turn Beck the clock to those carefree days of yore, when only the knights and other Lords had any political say or sway, even though their numbers Palin comparison with those of the actual people, the ones whose labor feeds the Overprivileged Ones but who receive less than a tenth of the money generated by OUR Labor?

Are we to bow to the mandates by two clownish Puppets of that government, whose own ancestors weren’t allowed full participation in the government and the electoral process until 1964, years after Michael Steele (Steal?) and Clarence “Uncle” Thomas were BORN? The mandates that only the Rich, in the form of Corporate Rule, are allowed to govern Americans?

And they call Liberals “Elitists”. The Faux-“Elite” Elitists at Fox News who tell us this crap would never soil their own hands with real honest Work. Rush and Bill O’Reilly have gained over a BILLION dollars apiece being the Paid Lying Actors who promote the words their even wealthier Masters tell them to spew.

The others, Beck, Palin, North, Hannity, Dobbs, Levin, Michael the “Savage” Weiner, Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, “Scooter” Libby… None of them would put their Dainty Hands to the mill shovel, put their overly privileged lives in jeopardy in a mine or a factory where the “excessive safety regulations” they carp and complain about like the whiny-ass effete BITCHES they truly are… are consistently ignored and cut further back in every session of the Rich Bitch controlled congress.

Certainly their Corporate Whoremasters never would. Yet they claim to be the spokesmen of “Real Americans” and claim the power and right to say who “Real Americans” are.
They pretend to be Working Class yet never work. They’re no more Working Class than their sorry Chickenshit Chickenhawk asses were ever Real Soldiers.

Italy’s emperor gets hauled down

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Silvio Berlusconi reminds one of an Italian version of the fascist-leaning Fox News owner, Rupert Murdoch. Both own the press and in Berlusconi’s case, he even bought the top political position in his country though Murdoch likes to stay in the shadows and just buy the politicians. But now Italy’s emperor gets hauled down to the ground by his wife! She accuses him of being the sugar daddy for a 17 year old girl… Oh Slick Willy!

PROFILE of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi

“That’s enough, I cannot remain with a man who consorts with minors,” Ms (Veronica) Lario was quoted as saying in La Repubblica.

“I read in the papers about how he has been hanging around a minor – because he must have known her before she was 18 – and how she called him ‘Grandpa’ and about their meetings in Rome and Milan.

“This is no longer acceptable. How can I stay with such a man?” La Stampa quoted her as saying.

She also said Mr Berlusconi had failed to attend his own daughters’ 18th birthday celebrations.
————————————————————————————————————–
Well there! One can see that the Big Conservative Values Man of Italy has certainly fallen a bit short in the eyes of his current wife in the personal morality department. One wonders what Pope Rat thinks of all this? Will Silvio be forgiven in the eyes of the Church, if not his wife’s?

This Italian telenovela just keeps getting funnier and funnier. We want to say Poor Italy, but we really can’t, because they at least eat much better than we do in the US. Now where is Monica these days?

No Country For Porch Monkeys

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New York Post racist cartoon about Connecticut chimpanzee The New York Post cartoon conveys a single message, because it certainly wasn’t humor. This is a warning for President Obama, drawn in the form of a thought balloon for public consumption, which has been floated before. White masters kill naughty blackeys. White supremacists hunt upstart niggers. Xenophobic kooks hurt people who don’t look like them. Cops kill ordinary African Americans with complete impunity.

Even black policemen kill innocent black men, on a very regular basis.

Message to Obama: Our corporate-interest jackals can shoot you dead on the street, in the guise of a racist act, and the American public will have thought it inevitable. There will be no inquest to determine if there was a military industrial complex conspiracy behind your assassination. No one will look beyond the lone gunman theory.

Dear Obama, just an unsubtle reminder to toe the line: there is a price to pay for white displeasure.

Hell, it could even be two beat cops with a taser. [This is] No Country For Porch Monkeys.

That’s what this cartoon was about. Somebody call the FBI, because making a threat against the life of the president is against the law.

Murdoch puts Obama on public notice: white men licensed to kill bad monkeys

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cartoon
The page in the New York Post before this cartoon featured a photograph of President Obama signing [writing] the Stimulus Bill. Putting aside the offensive connotation, does the cartoon work on any level? Is there a joke in linking the Chimpanzee gone native in Connecticut to the Stimulus Bill? What is it?

Is the cartoonist drawing on a third association, to the big laugh line from Die Hard, when an helicopter full of FBI guys, snotty agents who didn’t want the assistance of our hero, explodes, and an LAPD regular says: “I guess they’ll have to get some more FBI guys.”

What is it? The Stimulus Bill was written by a monkey? It was argued and reshaped by a dueling phalanx of legislators. It may have become disfigured, but was it by any stretch engineered by a monkey?

Certainly the moneyed class, which Murdoch represents, objects to giving any of the treasury to middle America. It can go to banks, or CEOs, or in the form of tax cuts to the multi-billionaires, but craft an economic solution that puts jobs or financial relief in the hands of ordinary people and the corporate press is not interested. So the bill author would be a bleeding-heart, or a sentimentalist, or Rainman for that matter. But where does the analogy work as a monkey?

A chimp-faced lampoon worked for Bush, because of the resemblance, and the mental acuity, and verbal skills. The Stimulus Bill can be plenty of wrong things, was it dumb?

II.
Here’s the apology the NYPost offered for their cartoon. What they said, or left unsaid, certainly didn’t match their bad taste to argue their cartoon wasn’t about Obama, but naming the piece THAT CARTOON.

Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy.

It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

III.
This note came in from Rita Ague:

What’s wrong with this picture?

Of course there’s racism out there, but be careful not to fall victom to spin. Rupert M. is one of the giants in the neo-con coup d’etat. The loss of a free press to military/industrial/corporate interests, and resulting news being turned into spin and hate mongering, is but one of many reasons I’ve put back on my old legal and journalist hats.

We are in such a hell of a mess, and we’re passing that mess onto and into the rest of the world. I’m not sure we can dig ourselves out. We may not see relief, and the kind of change we of good hearts and good minds so long for, come about in our lifetime.

Let’s pray constantly that some Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch induced bigot, or a neo-con agent posing as same, does not shoot or do away with Obama. The cause of the killing will, of course, be blamed on racism. But the real reason will be the fear the neo-cons have that our new president is going to take away their power and control, and quash their currently-being-exposed incredible greed.

My fear is that Murdoch, by and through his New York Post newspaper, FOX spin and hate channel, and all the other mass media he and his Neocon cohorts own and/or control, is spinning us to believe that some forthcoming assassination, when it occurs, was inevitable and based on a rise on racism and hatred, when it was truly based on more evil, Karl Rove-like Machiavellian (the end justifies any means) manipulation.

God help and protect us all, particularly Barack Obama.

Rita followed it up with this plea to MoveOn.org:

I need your help, Marc, in getting out the warning through Move-On’s far reaching Internet connections:

BEWARE! THE GIANT (military/industrial/corporate) NEO-CON SPIN MACHINE (formerly known as the “liberal mass media”) IS CRANKING UP

OBAMA, BAR THE DOOR!!!

I’m scared, Marc. It wasn’t accidental that the Post ran the dead ape cartoon with it’s deadly caption. Nor is it an accident that we are suddenly hearing more and more about all the racism and all the ‘racist’ assassination attempts being planned and made on Obama.

My intuition/precognition will be supported if and when we hear more of this racism and hate against “The Man” jive. As the old advertising saying goes: ‘When you think they’re tired of hearing about it, that’s when they’re just beginning to catch onto what you’re trying to tell/sell.”

I could be wrong about this “IT WAS A RACIST THING THAT DID HIM IN” campaign, but just in case I’m right, shouldn’t we be safe rather than sorry, and get a Move-On Campaign and heavy duty word of mouth going through the net, that we’re onto what’s being spun in the mass media, and why it’s being spun.

For sometime now, my slogan has been UNDO THE (military/industrial/corporate) COUP! Now I think we’d better come up with a new slogan, and start spreading it, as far and as wide as we can. It could be something like:

KEEP OBAMA ALIVE AND WELL – TELL THE PRESS TO GO TO HELL!

Rupert Murdoch FIX NEWS moves to sink Palin 2012 campaign for good

Not My Tribe

the myth of middle ground