The Guardian took on Rupert Murdoch and won. News Corp. is not only disgraced and facing criminal charges and civil suits, it has taken losses of $7 billion in less than a week.

The Atlantic has a closer look.

BBC interview with Murdoch in 1968 as he took possession of the newly defunct News of the World. As you can see, he was fully formed even then. The potential for trouble was apparent from the beginning.

Andrew Rawnsley of the Guardian — the paper that almost singlehandedly brought the phone hacking scandals in Britain to light — rips into Rupert Murdoch today. Because Murdoch is a naturalized American citizen and News Corp. is a registered U.S. company, he (or at least the people around him) may be facing charges there too. It’d be too much to hope this causes Fox News to miss a step, but it is a sign that even a behemoth can be brought down by the vigilance of what used to be known as journalism. There is much much less of it in the U.S. than the U.K., but maybe there’s just enough.

Britain has paid a high price for the concentration of so much media power in the hands of one family. Elected politicians have been cowed, public debate has been skewed and policy formulation has been distorted. On Friday, David Cameron offered a confessional on behalf of the whole political class. He admitted that both his government and previous ones had turned “a blind eye” to abuses of press power because they were so scared of that power. Too right. It has been known for years that a minority of journalists have suborned public officials, especially police officers, into selling confidential information. Yet successive home secretaries have either been unable or unwilling to get the police to do anything. It has long been an outrage that it is possible to own such a large chunk of the British media without being either a UK citizen or paying full UK taxes. Yet successive chancellors of the exchequer have been unable or unwilling to do anything about that either.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMwcECnCN_s

This will be a pleasant and welcome surprise.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoxxmGpp6HI&feature=relmfu

Report on the rioting in Greece

John Lanchester in the London Review of Books considers the potentially disastrous world-wide consequences if Greece defaults on its debt. The paragraph below captures the sense likely shared by people around the world that our chronic economic problems have been foisted upon us by the greed, incompetence, and criminality of financial institutions that have raked in unimaginably large amounts of money with little risk and no accountability. As tens of millions people lost their jobs and life savings, financial institutuions like Goldman Sachs posted record profits and passed around billions of dollars in bonuses to those responsible for the 2008 crash. These institutions are now not only too big to fail, they are also apparently too big to jail. That means we continue to pay for the consequences as their hold upon the global economy continues to tighten:

From the worm’s-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment. I’ve encountered this in Iceland and in Ireland and in the UK: a sense of alienation and incomprehension and done-unto-ness. People feel they have very little economic or political agency, very little control over their own lives; during the boom times, nobody told them this was an unsustainable bubble until it was already too late. The Greek people are furious to be told by their deputy prime minister that ‘we ate the money together’; they just don’t agree with that analysis. In the world of money, people are privately outraged by the general unwillingness of electorates to accept the blame for the state they are in. But the general public, it turns out, had very little understanding of the economic mechanisms which were, without their knowing it, ruling their lives. They didn’t vote for the system, and no one explained the system to them, and in any case the rule is that while things are on their way up, no one votes for Cassandra, so no one in public life plays the Cassandra role. Greece has 800,000 civil servants, of whom 150,000 are on course to lose their jobs. The very existence of those jobs may well be a symptom of the three c’s, ‘corruption, cronyism, clientelism’, but that’s not how it feels to the person in the job, who was supposed to do what? Turn down the job offer, in the absence of alternative employment, because it was somehow bad for Greece to have so many public sector workers earning an OK living? Where is the agency in that person’s life, the meaningful space for political-economic action? She is made the scapegoat, the victim, of decisions made at altitudes far above her daily life – and the same goes for all the people undergoing ‘austerity’, not just in Greece. The austerity is supposed to be a consequence of us all having had it a little bit too easy (this is an attitude which is only very gently implied in public, but it’s there, and in private is sometimes spelled out). But the thing is, most of us don’t feel we did have it particularly easy. When you combine that with the fact that we have so little real agency in our economic lives, we tend to feel we don’t deserve much of the blame. This feeling, which is strong enough in Ireland and Iceland, and which will grow steadily stronger in the UK, is so strong in Greece that the country is heading for a default whose likeliest outcome, by far, is a decade of misery for ordinary Greeks.

Life, death and “managed care” from Michael Moore’s Sicko

As we move more deeply into an exploration of Frye’s notion of God, just about all current events dealing with policies that rationalize needless human suffering in a world that is in every way familiar to us appear particularly relevant.

Over at the The Dish, for example, health care is regularly debated. It is informative for Canadians to have a look at this latest post reproduced below: “Emergency Health Care Isn’t Health Care.” The Americans are still struggling with issues regarding health care that were more or less settled everywhere else decades ago. And it’s still a secret to many of them that they’ve bumbled into the worst — not the best, the worst — system when it comes to delivery. American health care, like much else in the American socio-economic contract, seems designed to deliver misery to the many for the profit of a few.

Canadians need to keep this in mind when the Harper Conservatives turn their attention to health care. Because, having spent tens of billions of dollars in public funds to reassure the necessary handful of wary Ontario voters to grant Stephen Harper’s wish for a majority government with 39.6% of the vote, “austerity” will soon be the watch word. Meanwhile, there are supermax prisons to build to accommodate our falling crime rate, as well as jets to purchase to sustain our position as a military superpower. In other words, American priorities. The more money that is spent ginning up fear and resentment, the less money there is for the maintenance of social justice.

The fact that emergency room care is guaranteed by the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act does not mean that everyone has access to effective healthcare. But 1986 does seem to me to be the real moment when America socialized medicine – under Reagan! In a real Ron-Paul style free market in healthcare, where everyone has to buy their own insurance or not and deal with the consequences, chronically sick poor people must, in principle, be left, at some point, to suffer and die alone or bankrupted. Something in the American psyche does not want that to be America. Whatever part of the psyche that is, it sure isn’t inspired by Ayn Rand. It wants to put a floor under human suffering and sickness, to have a minimal baseline for care. We don’t want to see people dying in the streets.

But once you have done that, you have socialized medicine.