Welcome to the World's First Murdochracy

http://www.truthout.org/welcome-worlds-first-murdochracy57547

by John Pilger

Adelaide is Australia's festival city. Its arts festival is currently in swing. Polite debate, aesthetics and high-octane wine are putting the world to rights. With one exception. Adelaide is where Rupert Murdoch began his empire. The voracious trail starts here. No statue stands; his is a spectral presence, controlling the only daily newspaper, even the printing presses. Across Australia, he owns almost 70 percent of the capital city press and the only national newspaper and Sky Television and much else. Welcome to the world's first murdochracy.
What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch's editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along, and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: "What'll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?"
[...]
Murdoch knows that little separates the main political parties in Australia, Britain and America. He plays the man. In 1972, he backed Australia's Gough Whitlam, who revealed a radical reformer, even threatening to expose America's spy bases. A furious Murdoch swung his newspapers against Whitlam with stories so outrageously skewed that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. That has never been repeated.
[...]
In 1983, there were 50 major corporations dominating the world's media. By 2002, this had been reduced to nine. Rupert Murdoch says that eventually there will be three, including his own. If we accept this, media and information control will be the same, and we shall all be citizens of a murdochracy.
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La Casa Blanca declara la guerra a la cadena conservadora Fox

· La Administración de Obama anuncia que tratará al canal como «un oponente».
· La TV de Murdoch ha aumentado el 20% la audiencia gracias a la disputa.
http://www.elperiodico.com/default.asp?idpublicacio_PK=46&idioma=CAS&idtipusrecurs_PK=7&idnoticia_PK=655156

Por si no tenían bastante con los frentes abiertos en Irak y Afganistán, ahora la Casa Blanca acaba de iniciar otra guerra, esta vez con la cadena de televisión Fox News, propiedad del magnate de los medios de comunicación Rupert Murdoch, dueño del Wall Street Journal y el New York Post, entro otros periódicos. Entre el cruce de acusaciones de los últimos días, la cadena ha denunciado que Barack Obama no les concederá entrevistas hasta el próximo año.
[...]
Fue su directora de Comunicación, Anita Dunn, quien la semana pasada lanzó la primera piedra durante una entrevista a la cadena CNN, en la que acusó al canal de Murdoch de actuar como si fuera «el departamento de propaganda del Partido Republicano». Unos días más tarde, en declaraciones al New York Times, añadía que a partir de ahora la Fox será considerada como «un oponente más». Se da la circunstancia, lógica por otra parte, de que la Fox era la cadena preferida del Gobierno durante los ochos años de mandato de George Bush.
[...]
Ya hace un mes, al calor del debate sobre la reforma sanitaria, el líder estadounidense llegó a ofrecer entrevistas en un mismo día a cinco canales, pero dejó fuera a la televisión de Murdoch. Pero, además, el equipo de comunicación de la Casa Blanca ha puesto en marcha un blog para desmentir lo que llaman «las mentiras de la Fox».
La que fuera portavoz de la Casa Blanca durante la Administración Bush, Dana Perino, ha asegurado que la decisión del Gobierno de declarar la guerra a la Fox es una actuación «propia de dictadores de países en desarrollo». [A esto se le llama, «Un burro hablando de orejas»]

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Goldman Sachs, $18 Trillion Theft and The 'Doomsday Box'

1. Goldman Sachs Loses Grip on Its 'Doomsday Machine'.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aFeyqdzYcizc

Sergey Aleynikov, 39, a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, was arrested on theft charges, July 3, as he stepped off a flight at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. That was two days after Goldman told the government he[Aleynikov] had stolen its secret, rapid-fire, stock and commodities trading software['Doomsday Box'], in early June, during his last week as a Goldman employee. Prosecutors say Aleynikov uploaded the program code to an unidentified Web site server in Germany.
[...]
The prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knows how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”[What???]
[...]
All this leaves us to wonder: Did Goldman really tell the government its high-speed, high-volume, algorithmic-trading program can be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways, as Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti said? And shouldn’t Goldman’s bosses be worried this revelation may cause lots of people to start hypothesizing aloud about whether Goldman Sachs itself might have misused this program? [What's been implied here is tremendous!]

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2. Massive $18 Trillion Theft Of US Funds By Israeli Backed Network.
http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1249.htm

A stunning FSB report circulating in the Kremlin today states that the largest theft in World history has been engineered by the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) under the direction of current Israeli Prime Minister -Benjamin Netanyahu, Australian media oligarch -Rupert Murdoch and the US investment bank giant -Goldman Sachs who have stolen from the American mutual and pension fund account holders over $18 Trillion through a device known as the “Doomsday box”.
[...]
These reports have come to light since last weeks arrest of a Mossad agent named Sergey Aleynikov by the United States; who, these reports say, stole from Goldman Sachs the most “complex and secretive stock manipulating programme ever created” and turned it over to Tzipi Livni, who in turn then gave copies of it to Russia, China and Germany.
Western news reports on the arrest of Aleynikov state that upon learning of the theft of their “Doomsday Box”, Goldman Sachs ordered the US Government to arrest him, but as noted by the Bloomberg News Service, “what was Goldman doing with this programme to begin with”?
[...]
The power that ISA-led Goldman Sachs bank has had over the US -stealing nearly the entire wealth of that Nation- has been devastatingly detailed by the Rolling Stone Magazine News Service in their report titled “The Great American Bubble Machine: How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression”.

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1249.htm

3. The Great American Bubble Machine.
The Great American Bubble Machine -Goldman-Sachs and the crash

4. Rogue Algorithms And Other Mutually Assured Destruction Program Trading Alternatives.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/rogue-algorithms-and-other-mutually-assured-desturction-program-trading-alternatives

Why Institutional Investors Should Be Concerned About High Frequency Traders(HFT)
There’s a lot to worry about.
_HFTs provide low quality liquidity.
_HFT volume can generate false trading signals.
_HFT computer servers are faster than other trading systems.
Because most HFT servers are co-located at exchanges, they can beat out institutional or retail orders, causing them to pay more or sell for less than they should have for a stock.
Then there are the “what if” problems that could be created by HFTs.
_What if a regulation like the uptick rule were enacted?
Volumes could implode and stocks that appeared highly liquid could become extremely difficult to trade with wide spreads and no depth in the quote.
_What if a “rogue” algorithm entered the market?
Many HFTs are hedge funds that enter their orders into the market through a “sponsored access” arrangement with a broker. Many of these arrangements do not have any pre-trade risk controls since these clients demand the fastest speed. Due to the fully electronic nature of the equity markets today, one keypunch error could wreak havoc.
Nothing would be able to stop a market destroying order once the button was pressed.

Gives new meaning to the term “mutually assured destruction”

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Murdoch CEO Labels Bloggers “Political Extremists”

·John Hartigan laments how bloggers are not sent to jail like in China or Burma[!!!!!].
http://www.prisonplanet.com/murdoch-ceo-labels-bloggers-political-extremists.html

A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited, labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as “political extremists”. Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police states like China and Burma.
In a speech to the National Press Club, Hartigan savagely dismissed blogs as, “Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance. Bloggers don’t go to jail for their work. They simply aren’t held accountable like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no insights,” barked Hartigan. “In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It really is time this myth was blown apart. Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are common.”
Hartigan doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to suit the demands of their corporate owners. This is the very reason why blogs and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the mainstream media’s audience share, because people are sick of being treated like idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.
Indeed, Hartigan’s boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words, Murdoch’s many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the manufactured case for invasion. Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the corporate media’s “loss of power” to alternative media and Internet blogs, seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.

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The end of the age of free

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/10/music-news-murdoch-free-google

In art, as in commerce, a price tag traditionally has magical powers. With the flick of a wand, a pound sign confers desirability on an item that might be thrown away if it was handed out for nothing.
And yet for almost a decade now, quality entertainment and culture, as well as mainstream sources of news, have been freely available on the web. The arrival of the internet has seen musicians, publishers and news organisations all slowly float off together into uncharted waters.
Consumers who have grown up during the past 15 years are completely at home in a world where much of what they want to hear, see or read will cost them nothing. True, in the case of some films and TV shows, the practices involved may skirt around the law a bit. Generally speaking, though, culture has become a happy free-for-all. Now may be the time to pay the bill.
Chris Anderson, a leading American commentator on the web and editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, puts the matter concisely: "Somehow an economy had emerged around 'free' before the economic model that could describe it." Anderson's next book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, will both celebrate and analyse the effect of all this giving-away.
[...]
One of the biggest players in the game last week questioned the rationale behind the current give-away culture. Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, even went so far as to refer to it as a "flawed" business model when he spoke to reporters in New York. The media mogul – who owns the Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World in Britain, as well as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in America – announced that he was considering charging for more of his internet sites.
"We are now in the midst of an epochal debate over the value of content and it is clear to many newspapers that the current model is malfunctioning," Murdoch said. His volte-face followed background news that profits from News Corp newspapers were down year-on-year from $216m to $7m and that British newspaper advertising revenues were down 21%.

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Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism