pie in the sky: for all the marbles

It was supposed to be in the name of truth and justice.It was a dog and pony show like those found in the small circuses wandering over the English countryside at the end of the nineteenth century. It  keeps coming back to Guy Debord when thinking of this hacking scandal, with bald-faced lying becoming popular entertainment. After Rebekah Brooks’s appearance one would think Murdoch’s dross were churning out journalism of the highest standards. As Ms. Brooks remarked she is “sad and baffled” by this decline in quality.

Read More:http://www.cards2clients.com/pages/card_text_classic.htm ---Blatchford:By Ms. Brooks’ account, when she wasn’t ministering to soldiers (a campaign called “Help for Heroes”), she single handedly changed a law in Britain, which might come as news to the mother of the murdered child, Sarah Payne, who may have imagined she had a hand in it. image:

Guy Debord: Ideology is the basis of the thought of a class society in the conflict-laden course of history. Ideological facts were never a simple chimaera, but rather a deformed consciousness of realities, and in this form they have been real factors which set in motion real deforming acts; all the more so when the materialization, in the form of spectacle, of the ideology brought about by the concrete success of autonomized economic production in practice confounds social reality with an ideology which has tailored all reality in terms of its model.

Read More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/why-i-foam-pied-rupert-murdoch ---Marbles:If you're of sound mind, you might quite reasonably ask what possessed me to smuggle a shaving-foam pie into Portcullis House and throw it at (though, alas, not into) the face of one of the world's richest and most powerful men. I didn't do it because I wanted more Twitter followers. Simply put, I did it for all the people who couldn't. It's not difficult to find reasons to dislike Rupert Murdoch. His reach is one of the most insidious and toxic forces in global politics today. The phone-hacking scandal, despicable though it is, barely scratches the surface of the damage done by News International. It is a media empire built on deceit and bile, that trades vitriol for debate and thinks nothing of greasing the wheels of power until they turn in its favour. What's more, no matter what the grievances he wreaks on those he has never met, his power and money keep him forever safely out of their reach.

After a short-break in the proceedings, a composed and now jacket-less Murdoch resumed his testimony. Conservative MP Louise Mensch praised Murdoch for having a “lot of guts” to come back. Why not a purple heart.  She played t-ball with him that even an eighty year old could muscle into the bleachers. Mensch asked if the News Corp. CEO considered resigning. Murdoch replied that he’s the “best man to clean up the mess.” Earlier , the table-tapping Murdoch appeared unsteady during what he termed the “most humble day of my life.” His son, James, attempted to rescue hesitant papa a couple of times, but was rebuffed by members of the committee. James, who chairs the British newspaper group, also told his dad to stop pounding on the table.

Read More:http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/jack-morgan-and-midget/ ---Congressional hearings are always a joke: a few minutes of soundbites, a few days of moral posturings and then back to normal. The crowning moment in this theatre of absurd was the Pecora Commission formed to investigated the causes of the financial market crash (sounds familiar, doesn’t it) in 1933. With the public clamoring for some action (awfully familiar), the persecutor Ferdinand Pecora went after the private banking and its crown jewel, the House of Morgan. Pecora was successful in figuring out that their executives paid no taxes in the years immediately following the crash, and that before the crash, Morgan offered stocks at discounted rates to many influential people, including the former president Calvin Coolidge, Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts. Defending himself, Jack Morgan said Pecora had “the manners of a prosecuting attorney who is trying to convict a horse thief.” The Morgan testimony was so outrageous that Senator Carter Glass quipped, “We are having a circus, and the only things lacking now are peanuts and colored lemonade.” A press agent for the Ringling Brothers Circus took advantage of this quote to put a midget (one Lya Graf) on Morgan’s lap. To compound the error, the committee chairman, Senator Duncan Fletcher of Florida, asked with newspapers not to print the pictures, which only made them rush to do so.---


The pie enabled Murdoch, who told the panel that he is “absolutely shocked, appalled and ashamed” over the activity, previously condoned of the now closed- temporarily? like a salubrious restaurant that needs to dispose of the lice and rat feces- News of the World, to wrap up the hearings on a high note. Labour MP Chris Bryant, a known critic of Murdoch, blasted the shaving cream attack as “despicable.” He believes not even arch-foe Murdoch deserves to “be treated in such a manner.” It was a great day for shareholders: News Corp. stock rose six percent to $15.94 after the hearings.

Guy Debord:The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and negation of real life. The spectacle is materially “the expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient… grows coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life. “The need for money is thus the real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). The spectacle extends to all social life the principle which Hegel (in the Realphilosophie of Jena) conceives as the principle of money: it is “the life of what is dead, moving within itself.” Read More:http://libcom.org/library/society-of-the-spectacle-debord-nine a

Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/why-i-foam-pied-rupert-murdoch ---Marbles:I was filled with hope as Tom Watson questioned Murdoch Sr relentlessly with the passion and vigour we might expect to be the norm when our elected representatives face down the perpetrators of a modern Watergate. For a few bright moments I thought I might see justice done, keep the pie in my bag and spare myself a night in jail. Those moments were short lived: as committee member after committee member feebly prodded around the issues and Murdoch Jr began to dominate, I knew I was going to have to make a massive tit of myself. To be honest, I had not expected to get so far, but parliamentary security, with its machine-gun toting cops and scatter X-rays, is apparently no match for a man with some shaving-foam covered plates in his bag. Then, once inside the committee room, I was helped along by some unwelcome luck. I had always intended to wait until the end of the hearings anyway before I launched my circus crusade, and as the penultimate speaker finished several people made their way out, leaving me a clear path to Murdoch. It was a horrible feeling: I had a plan, a pie and no excuses left.---

ADDENDUM:
Thorstein Veblen:The current periodical press, whether ephemeral or other, is a vehicle for advertisements. This is its raison d’etre as a business proposition and this decides the lines of its management without material qualification. Exceptions to the rule are official and minor propagandist periodicals, and in an uncertain measure, scientific journals. The profits of publication come from the sale of advertising space. The direct returns from sales and subscriptions are now a matter of wholly secondary consequence. Publishers of periodicals, of all grades of transiency, aim to make their product as salable as may be, in order to pass their advertising pages under the eyes of as many readers as may be. The larger the circulation the greater, other things equal, the market value of the advertising space. The highest product of this development is the class of American newspapers called “independent.” These in particular — and they are followed at no great interval by the rest — edit all items of news comment or gossip with a view to what the news ought to be and what opinions ought to be expressed on passing events.


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Read More:http://blog.jonedwards.me/post/7533753596/resurrecting-an-old-meme-for-a-new-joke-love-it

The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiments of his readers and then tell them what they like to believe. By this means he maintains or increases the circulation. Read More:http://boingboing.net/2009/03/14/thorstein-veblen-pre.html a

image:http://www.salem-news.com/articles/december172009/jerr_west.php ---If that latter is certainly true — a 2006 investigation by the British information commission found that in one major case alone, the notes of a private investigator showed he had supplied information for a fee to no fewer than 305 named journalists — it appears that no one at News International was terribly worked up about it. Murdoch the Elder, for instance, was asked if, given all that was known generally and all that is still being learned, he had ordered the editors of all his papers to do review their own practices. “No,” he said. “But I’m more than prepared to do so.”---Blatchford National Post

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