James Murdoch accepts 74% pay rise to $17m
James Murdoch has accepted a pay rise of 74%. That’s right, after the phone hacking scandal, closure of News of the World, and his messy evidence at Parliament, the hereditory heir to the position of ‘world’s most powerful man’ has accepted a huge raise in his wage, to $17 million. How did the media report [...]
Day 6 – Prisonomics
Jonnie Marbles wrote this from prison, where he was serving time for throwing a cream pie at Rupert Murdoch. See his previous prison blogs here. Here, as far as I can gather, is how the prison economy works. Every Sunday (today) our captors furnish us with a “canteen sheet”. This is a double sided A4 list [...]
Jonnie Marbles Prison Blog – Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Wandsworth
Jonnie Marbles wrote this from prison, where he was serving time for throwing a cream pie at Rupert Murdoch. See his previous prison blogs here. I’m worried I’m going to end up writing 14 stories where nothing happens. It’s sobering to think that The Shawshank Redemption chronicled 20 years in sing-sing and still only found [...]
Jonnie Marbles Prison Blog – Don’t Fear The Jailer
Jonnie Marbles wrote this from prison, where he was serving time for throwing a cream pie at Rupert Murdoch. See his previous prison blogs here. Every day feels like a week in prison, but today was the first where seven days actually got knocked off my sentence. It nearly didn’t happen. I was woken at [...]
Murdoch and the European collapse: the chance for the left?
Is the Italian economy about to collapse? Is the Eurozone going to fall apart? I don’t know. But it is certainly creaking wildly. If it does, it will surely make the tumbling of Lehman Brothers look like relatively small fry. After cutting the bottom out of their economies, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland too are [...]
The fungibility of Rebekah Brooks
Economists have a word for it: fungibility. It describes how replaceable a type of commodity is. Art isn’t at all fungible – every piece is unique. Money is highly fungible. So is Rebakah Wade. So is Paul Stephenson. So is David Cameron. Unlike Salvador Dali, Wolfgang Amedeus Mozart or Jane Espenson, these people are easily [...]
A Thousand Questions but Just One Issue
There is a single issue at the heart of the News Corp. scandal from which all others emanate, and that is the influence that the corporate world and the very, very rich have over supposedly democratic institutions and a supposedly democratic society. So when we ask why MPs were too scared to stand up to [...]
Murdoch, New Labour, Credit Crunch, Expenses: collapses of concentrated power
Four years, and four great institutions of British capitalist hegemony have been shaken by crisis. In 2008, the banks collapsed. In 2009, it was expenses and ‘trust in MPs’. In 2010, New Labour – the machine which coaxed the working classes to vote for neo-liberalism. And in 2011, it’s News International. Each seems in a [...]
Now is the time for a campaign to stop Murdoch’s tax dodging
Many of you will no doubt be enjoying the collapse of Rupert Murdoch’s evil empire as much as I am. The end of his cynical, sneering and prurient approach to journalism can only be a good thing. But we shouldn’t confine our glee to the end of a nasty newspaper or two. There’s a person [...]
Murdoch’s media: it’s ownership, not regulation, that matters
In the coming weeks we must surely move the discussion around the News of the World from the details of phone hacking to the questions of control. Already, David Cameron has shown his skill in crisis management by announcing the abolition of the Press Complaints Commission – only for the Commission to point out that [...]
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