The youngest son of billionaire propagandist Rupert Murdoch sent a peace-loving message to his rich friends yesterday, decrying the Nazi attacks in Charlottesville his family’s propaganda empire helped seed.
No shit Sherlock.
The primitive tribalism and economic class warfare now roiling America are a direct result of the Right Wing Noise Machine built by James Murdoch’s daddy. Eighty-six-year-old Rupert has been a plague on decent people the world over for most of his life.
He is the 35th richest man on the planet, with a personal fortune estimated at $13.1 billion and a media empire valued at $62 billion. A reprehensible bottom feeder who could elevate the human race merely by his retroactive removal from it.
Profitable hate is Rupert Murdoch’s real legacy and J
ames Murdoch has wallowed in the proceeds of his family’s evil empire. First as CEO of its News Corp. parent company in Europe and Asia, and now as CEO of its Twenty-First Century Fox publishing arm. The Harvard dropout made a salary of $21 million there in 2016.
You don’t get to do that and then condemn the Nazis whose primitive tribalism just resulted in the deaths of three Americans in Charlottesville and injured 35.
Not when they’re your Nazis, Klansmen, white supremacists and white nationalists.
The flagship of the Right Wing Noise Machine is Murdoch’s Fox News. Less notable pieces include Murdoch’s hate-mongering National Enquirer and New York Post. Also in the empire: The 20th Century Fox film studio and the elitist Wall Street Journal, with its single-minded devotion to corporate profits over people.
Without Fox News, tens of millions of Americans in the faltering middle class would still have houses, jobs, pensions and affordable healthcare. Instead, our homes have been foreclosed and jobs off-shored.
With Rupert Murdoch’s duplicitous help the Un
ited States has been transformed from a nation of homeowners into a nation of renters, and from a representative democracy with a proud middle class into a corrupt oligarchy where workers cower in fear.
Our pensions have been replaced by 401k retirement accounts which generate millions for the country club members who invest them for us. Our unions gutted.
Thanks in no small part to the Murdoch media empire’s relentless Wall Street cheerleading.
All is well, according to the Murdoch lie machine. These are halcyon days.
Never mind what’s happening to your neighbors, relatives and friends. The broken men in their 40s and 50s who can’t find a decent job any more; the recent college grads working as baristas; and the home down the street which has been for sale since 2008.
The economy is booming, according to the Murdoch lie machine. The world envies us.
Never mind that healthcare costs have rise
n so precipitously millions of Americans now die prematurely and work sick, and medical bills have become the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy.
Those painful truths are not going away any time soon just because James Murdoch – a 44-year-old Harvard dropout – senses the guillotine of populist rage looming above his royal neck.
The Murdochs have also helped change our lives for the worse in less obvious ways.
Case in point, the movies available on the 999 channels of your cable television system. Don’t hold your breath looking for a classic antiwar or anti-establishment movie. Award winning films like The Green Zone, The China Syndrome, Roots, Norma Rae, Malcolm X, Matewan, Hair, The Sand Pebbles, All The President’s Men,and One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.
These complex, humanistic tales have all but vanished in the police state the Murdochs have helped create.
The original impetus for the sea change Rupe
rt Murdoch helped orchestrate in America’s social fabric was a misguided bid to counter the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome.” That’s the military term for an America which was weary of endless war in the early 1970s and wanted to peacefully coexist with the rest of the planet.
The effort to transform us into a more warlike nation brought Daddy Murdoch together with former President Richard Nixon, the Pentagon and the intelligence community in the early 70s. Together, they’ve helped bury classic antiwar films like M*A*S*H beneath an avalanche of pro-war and pro-torture flicks like Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, and We Were Soldiers Once.
Movies that reduce our very human adversaries to “skinnies” and “ragheads” and treat them in much the same manner as orcs, goblins and trolls in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Gone are films celebrating strong individuals who bucked th
e system, such as Cool Hand Luke and On the Waterfront. Such behavior is no longer worthy of celebration in the American police state.
More recently, Hollywood and the Right Wing Noise Machine have also deluged us with a tsunami of comic book adaptations celebrating wealthy “super-humans.” Films with names like like Batman, Ironman, Murdochman and Trumpman.
The subliminal message?
Some Americans are inherently superior to others and it’s a lucky thing for all of us. America needs powerful, wealthy executives like Bruce Wayne, Michael Bloomberg and Tony Stark to save it. Especially now that poor and working class Americans are such losers.
That elitist message is completely contrary to the “we’re all in it together” mindset of Occupy Wall Street, which won World War II and catapulted America to world leadership.
It reduces hardworking Americans
to props and advances the idea that only the wealthy have human value.
Our woods are now filled with traumatized veterans of foreign military conflicts. Wars waged in places like Iraq, Yemen, and Syria mostly to facilitate greater corporate profit growth. Rather than protect Americans.
The Murdochs have helped to make the po
or and middle class invisible on our own television and movie screens. We no lon
Lord knows, we can’t be trusted to speak for ourselves. Our credit scores are too low.
Local news media ownership has given way to huge national conglomerates run by New York hedge funds and private equity funds. Chains like the Gannett Company, which have no commitment to the communities they operate in beyond sucking them dry.
The change means that obituaries and wedding announcements, which our local newspapers once ran as a form of community service, must now be purchased. Often at a cost of more than $500.
It means courageous working class columni
sts like Ji
mmy Breslin and Mike Royko have been replaced by lickspittle cowards like The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin and Fox’s Jerry Rivers. Class traitors who have turned their backs on the truth and their fellow working class Americans to rub elbows with the country club set.All of the members of the Murdoch family have benefited financially from this class warfare. Not just Rupert.
James Murdoch’s daddy also seeded and cherished the current climate of xenophobic hate toward Immigrants, Muslims, Women, Blacks and Jews via half truths, exaggeration and knowing lies. He and his family are financial beneficiaries of this highly profitable hate, too.
Without the Murdochs, there would be no Trump in the White House trying to create a climate of racial violence so he can impose martial law and grab dictatorial power by the pussy. Much less Nazis terrorizing decent, hardworking Americans on our own streets.
The painful truth is James Murdoch had no b
usiness at Harvard in the first place and wouldn’t have been at the elite school without his rich daddy’s influence. He’s not a thoughtful person, he’s a silver spoon mofo who has never worked a real day in his life.
Just like Donald Trump, who dropped out of Fordham University before his rich daddy got him into UPenn.
Work ethic?
Shee-it.
Everything these silver spoons know about work can be summarized in six words: “Getting – somebody – else – to – do – it.”
What James Murdoch is attempting to accomplish now is a classic move by the Predatory 1 Percent. It’s an attempt to have the benefits of great wealth without the burdens. To preserve the billions of dollars the Murdoch family has grabbed from the rest of us by making a timely “pivot” from the political right to the center.
“Pivot” being the preferred term among business elites and the political aristocracy for trading in one set of profitable fake principles for another.
And w
hat of the credulous poor and middle class Americans who followed Rupert Murdoch to the right?
They don’t even count as collateral damage to the Murdochs. They’re pawns. Just like the rest of us.
They’re supposed to hate those of us on the left and we’re supposed to hate them back. Why?
Because otherwise we might all begin to smell the stench of the country club parasites who make this country stink.
All of which raises a simple question: How does a silver spoon mofo like James Murdoch make amends?
I know the answer
to return at least 90 percent of their $62 million wealth to the poor and middle class. Not via rich nonprofits, but by handing shares of stock directly to the masses until their media empire is publicly owned. Just like the Green Bay Packers football team.Step No. 3: No more country clubs and gated communities. No more walls. They need to live beside us. Not above us.
Peac
eful revolution is in the wind. It can sweep James Murdoch and his children away or they can come along for the ride. But they shouldn’t be allowed to shut themselves away in first class again, while the rest of the species rides coach.
The days of t
he silver spoon mofo are ending. James Murdoch knows it better than anyone or he wouldn’t have sent that note.The good news?
James Murdoch is already a better man than his daddy.
The bad news?
Cannibal serial-killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who claimed 17 lives, is probably a better man than Daddy Murdoch. And he munched on human organs while pondering his own pivot toward basic human decency.
