Have
you ever seen such a fucked up disaster as the European Union? The European Union is in its death throes,
drowning in a cesspool of greed and corruption, gasping for its last breath. Now the ultimate betrayal, they have given
Rupert Murdoch unconditional control of the airwaves in the EU, throwing their
citizens under the perpetual war for profit bus.
Whoever
controls the media, controls the mind.
Jim
Morrison
So
on Thursday while Obama was ginning up the fear factor in the U.S. for war on
Syria (no, not ISIS, Syria) this headline dated September 11, 2014 escaped the
media: From Variety:
Fox’s BSkyB Gets Greenlight from
European Union to Create Pay TV Giant. I mean really?
Excerpt:
LONDON — U.K. satcaster BSkyB has cleared
the first of the hurdles as it seeks to create a pan-European pay TV giant.
On
Thursday, the company said it had received unconditional clearance from
the European Commission,
the executive arm of the European Union, and the Austrian Federal Competition
Authority for its acquisition of Sky Italia and at least 57% of Sky Deutschland.
What
does it mean when they say, “unconditional clearance?” If anyone reading this knows, please let me
know.
BSkyB announced the deal in July to take
control of its German and Italian sister companies. 21st Century Fox owns a 39%
stake in BSkyB, 100% of Sky Italia and 57% of Sky Deutschland. The proposed
deal will see BSkyB acquire Fox’s stakes in Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland. It
also will bid for the remaining Sky Deutschland shares.
The
merged entity, which some observers are calling Sky Europe, will have 20 MILLION PAY TV SUBSCRIBERS IN THE U.K.,
IRELAND, ITALY, GERMANY AND AUSTRIA. POTENTIALLY, SKY EUROPE WILL BE ABLE TO
REACH UP TO 97 MILLION HOUSEHOLDS.
Well,
caaaaching!! BSkyB that sounds
familiar. Hmmm, what’s this from New York Times.
Excerpt:
Hack Attack
Now comes Nick Davies, an award-winning
special correspondent for The Guardian, with
“Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch.”
This book, too, is a Guardian-centric
tale: in this case, about the pivotal role the newspaper played in exposing the
British phone-hacking scandal that forced the closure of Mr. Murdoch’s tabloid
The News of the World, and cast an unforgiving light on the incestuous ties among the country’s most powerful media conglomerate,
the police and the political elite…
Lawyers who won court orders forcing the
disclosure of information that underpinned much of The Guardian’s early
reporting on The News of the World’s widespread use of voice mail interception
to land front-page “splashes” are supporting characters in this telling.
So, too, is Tom Watson, a member of
Parliament whose relentless inquiries helped keep the story alive. For their trouble, they found themselves
under surveillance, their private lives laid bare in reports commissioned by
the News of the World’s parent company, News International.
The
whistle-blower Sean Hoare risked jail when he became the first former News of
the World reporter to go on the record to say that phone hacking was endemic in
the newsroom and encouraged by top editors.
Murdoch’s
empire owns Cameron and most of the British Parliament and if you investigate
Murdoch’s criminality, you will be sorry he’ll bring down the weight of the
British Parliament and justice system on you. From the Daily Mail:
Excerpt:
Former Downing Street spin doctor Andy
Coulson stood to profit from Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB takeover through shares he
held in News Corporation, it had been claimed.
Mr. Coulson is understood to have been
awarded the stock in the U.S. Company
when he resigned as News of the World editor in 2007 over phone hacking claims.
Excuse
me, what’s that? Coulson was awarded
stock in the U.S. Company when he resigned over phone hacking claims?
He went on to become Downing Street
Communications Director with close links to Mr. Cameron, who would later become the Prime
Minister overseeing the deal. Mr. Cameron has previously admitted that he and Mr.
Coulson were 'close friends'.
Yep,
failing up that’s the American way, you are alleged to have committed a crime and
now you have a cushy job as “Downing Street Communications Director” because of
your close ties to the next Prime Minister, Cameron. How much you want to bet that Cameron’s
position was a sure thing and Murdoch’s empire would see to it. Did Murdoch have anything to do with the “sexed
up” justification for war produced by Britain?
The revelation could cause further damage
to Mr. Cameron as Mr. Coulson prepares to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry
this Thursday. Former News International boss Rebekah Brooks will give evidence
on Friday…
As a special advisor and civil servant Mr.
Coulson would had to have declared the holdings when he joined Downing Street
in 2010.
In
the run-up to the anticipated acquisition of BSkyB the share price of News Corp
soared to almost $19.
But after it emerged that News of the
World staff had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler the share
price plummeted to around $14 - wiping tens of millions of dollars off the
value of the firm.
Wow,
that’s pretty horrible, I would think Cameron would be quaking in his boots.
The revelation came as it emerged that David
Cameron’s aides will pore over his text messages to Mrs. Brooks this week amid
fears he will be embarrassed by fresh details about his links to the Murdoch
empire.
I’m sure they’ll save those text messages for the investigators.
The Prime Minister, with his lawyers and
special advisers, have set up a unit to study the texts to the former News of
the World editor to search for ‘landmines’.
No 10 is braced for a difficult week as Mrs.
Brooks and Mr. Coulson will both be giving evidence to Lord Justice Leveson’s
inquiry into press standards.
It has been claimed that Mr. Cameron was
so close to Mrs. Brooks that he texted her up to a dozen times a day – and that
Mrs. Brooks has kept all the communications.
Prime
Minister must be a pretty cushy job that he has all that time on his hands for
sexting with Mrs. Brooks.
Mr. Cameron and Mrs. Brooks are said to
sign-off some of their text messages to intimate friends with the friendly ‘x’
preferred by many habitual phone texters.
If they did so in messages to each other,
it could add to the Government’s growing discomfort over the Leveson
disclosures.
Who
paid for the Prime Minister’s lawyers to scrub “landmine” texts to Cameron from
News of the World editor?
It has been claimed that Mr. Cameron was
so close to Mrs. Brooks that he texted her up to a dozen times a day – and that
Mrs. Brooks has kept all the communications…
Mrs. Brooks is expected to be asked about
her relations with politicians and senior police officers when she appears
before Lord Leveson on Friday.
She could also be pressed over Mr.
Cameron’s admission that he had ridden a horse loaned to Mrs. Brooks by the
Metropolitan Police.
Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt is facing
questions about the nature of his relationship with the Murdoch Empire
Thick
as thieves. Is there any way these
criminals will be brought to justice?
Mr.
Cameron and seven other Cabinet Ministers will be given advance sight of
witness statements from Mrs. Brooks and Mr. Coulson after successfully winning ‘core
participant’ status at an emergency hearing on Friday…
So
Cameron and the cabinet ministers get advance copies of the testimony of Brooks
and Coulson.
The ministers are David Cameron, Nick
Clegg, Vince Cable, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Theresa May, Ken Clarke and
George Osborne.
This
latest worry for the Prime Minister comes hot on the heels of the Jeremy Hunt
scandal.
According to The Independent on Sunday,
David Cameron agreed to a meeting with one of Rupert Murdoch' senior
executives, that was arranged by the lobbyist now at the centre of the scandal.
Jeremy Hunt's culture secretary has
already had to step down over emails sent from the same senior executive
Frederic Michel about a BSkyB contract he was overseeing at the time.
Mr. Michel set up the meet in 2009
between the Prime Minister and Jose Maria Aznar, the former Prime Minister of
Spain, and a member of New Corporation's board.
Man,
those Murdoch tentacles stretch all over the EU. In Spain ex-Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar is
a member of News Corporation’s board.
His involvement in the meeting - that
came just weeks after The Sun switched its support from Labour to Conservatives
- brings into doubts claims by Mr. Hunt and that Prime Minister that he is just
a lobbyist.
The meeting further demonstrates the
Prime Minister’s close relationship with the Murdoch’s and members of their
organisations.
But a Number 10 spokesman told the
newspaper: 'All contact with News International and News Corp has been declared
in the correct way. The Prime Minister has had no inappropriate discussions
about the BSkyB bid either as Prime Minister or before.'
Cameron
is up to his ears in the Murdoch Empire and now he has steered the EU to expand
that empire across the European Union to ensure the propaganda message to scare
people into submission. The latest,
immediate danger the EU and the Murdoch are trying to sell is ISIS. Scotland
stay with UK or ISIS will get you.
America ISIS is coming for you, bomb, bomb, bomb Syria. From
Business Insider:
August 29th, 2014
UK
Raises Terror Threat Level To 'Severe' — US
Has No Plans To Do The Same
Britain's government has raised the
country's terror threat level to "severe," Home Secretary Theresa May
said on Friday.
It's the second highest of five potential
threat levels. According to the U.K. government, it means an attack is
"highly likely." But there is
no intelligence to suggest an attack is imminent.
May said the threat level was raised
because of the risk from the deteriorating situation in Iraq and Syria, where
extremist militants from the group calling itself the Islamic State (also ISIS or ISIL). May said, however, that there was
no specific threat to Britain that caused the raise in the terror
level. This is the first time Britain's terror threat level has been at
"severe" since 2011.
Of
course there’s no intelligence to even suggest that such an attack is imminent,
it’s pure bullshit. These people are lunatics.
But guess what, once Fox is on every channel in the European Union…
well, I’ll let you finish that.
So
as of August 29th when Cameron raised the terrorist threat level in
Britain due to ISIS, the U.S. had no intention of raising the threat level. What happened between August 29 and September
11, 2014?
NEWS ORGANIZATIONS FINALLY REALIZE
OBAMA’S WAR PLAN IS A HOT MESS
President Obama’s plan to “degrade and
destroy” the Islamic State counts on pretty much everything going right in a
region of the world where pretty much anything the U.S. does always goes wrong.
Our newspapers of record today finally
remembered it’s their job to point stuff like that out.
The New York Times, in
particular, calls bullshit this morning — albeit without breaking from the
classic detached Timesian tonelessness…
I
love that term “Timesian Tonelessness”, I think I’ll use it.
Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt and Mark
Landler (with contributions from Matt Apuzzo and James Risen) start by pointing
out the essential but often overlooked fact that “American intelligence
agencies have concluded that [the Islamic State] poses no immediate threat to
the United States.”
And then, with the cover of “some
officials and terrorism experts,” they share a devastating analysis of all the
coverage that has come before:
Some
officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS
has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by
politicians, and that there has been little substantive public debate about the
unintended consequences of expanding American military action in the Middle
East.
How
much you want to bet they’re talking about Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the
politicians in the U.S. Murdoch owns.
You’ve got to love these quotes:
Daniel Benjamin, who served as the State
Department’s top counterterrorism adviser during Mr. Obama’s first term, said
the public discussion about the ISIS threat has been a “farce,” with “members
of the cabinet and top military officers all over the place describing the
threat in lurid terms that are not justified.”
Yep,
the ISIS threat justifying the U.S. bombing Assad in Syria is just a Murdoch
myth.
“It’s hard to imagine a better indication
of the ability of elected officials and TV talking heads to spin the public
into a panic, with claims that the nation is honeycombed with sleeper cells,
that operatives are streaming across the border into Texas or that the group
will soon be spraying Ebola virus on mass transit systems — all on the basis of
no corroborated information,” said Mr. Benjamin, who is now a scholar at
Dartmouth College…
Looks
like Obama and Cameron are looking to recreate the Cheney floor plan for lying
your people into war using Murdoch’s media.
Remember in the lead up to the Iraq War, Cheney’s office would leak exclusive,
unsubstantiated, anonymously sourced information to Judith Miller of the New
York Times regarding Saddam’s “nuclear weapons.” Then on Sunday talk shows Cheney would cite
Judith Miller’s column in the New York Times as proof that Saddam had nuclear
weapons. From Salon May 5, 2004:
Excerpt:
When the full history of the Iraq war is
written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American
journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed
themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White
House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave
errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors’ note published Wednesday. The
editors wrote:
“We have found … instances of coverage
that was not as rigorous as it should have been … In some cases, the
information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was
insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we
wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence
emerged — or failed to emerge … We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of
the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend
to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”…
Aggressively
reporting or aggressively transcribing government lies.
The reporter on many of the flawed
stories at issue was Judith Miller, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and authority on the Middle East. The
Times, insisting that the problem did not lie with any individual journalist,
did not mention her name. The paper was presumably trying to take the high road
by defending its reporter, but the omission seems peculiar.
While her editors
must share a large portion of the blame, the pieces ran under Miller’s byline.
It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources,
and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she
was told.
That’s
right, Miller was enthralled with Chalabi who was known in intelligence circles
as an unreliable drunk. Chalabi and “Curveball”
in their palatial digs, were feeding Miller the pap she sought that solidified
her own biased opinions formed by right-wingers like Cheney and his lap dog
Scooter Libby.
And of all
Miller’s unreliable sources, the most unreliable was Ahmed Chalabi — whose
little neocon-funded kingdom came crashing down last week when Iraqi forces
smashed down his door after U.S. officials feared he was sending secrets to
Iran.
Ha,
ha, his neocon-funded kingdom. And where
do you think the neocons got the money to fund his kingdom? U.S. taxpayer funds, funneled to neocon think
tanks through the State Department.
And
don’t forget, when Cheney traveled he insisted all TV channels be on Fox
News. Murdoch owns almost all the
stations and newspapers in the U.S. and Fox viewers have consistently been the
most misinformed sector of our population.
And guess what, Obama has announced he’s going to war with ISIS after
the U.S. and U.K. have recognized that ISIS is not a threat to America or
Britain. See what a Murdoch Media can do
for warmongers?
According to Alternet:
Excerpt:
In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on
air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the
channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently
misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently
misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”…
Stewart’s statement was factually
accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site
PolitiFact weighed
in and rated it “false.” In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,”
PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error—and later, doubly ironically,
failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?
There probably is a small group of media
consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall,
than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news
outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is
true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence—especially in areas of political
controversy.
Political
controversy a problem for Cameron, Murdoch’s Fox News to the rescue.
Iraq War
In 2003, a survey by the Program on International Policy
Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found widespread public
misperceptions about the Iraq war. For instance, many Americans believed the
U.S. had evidence that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had been collaborating in some way
with Al Qaeda, or was involved in the 9-11 attacks; many also believed that the
much touted “weapons of mass destruction” had been found in the country after
the U.S. invasion, when they hadn’t.
But not everyone was equally misinformed:
“The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their
source of news,” PIPA reported. “Those who receive most of their news from Fox
News are more likely than average to have misperceptions.”
For instance, 80 percent of Fox viewers held at least one of three
Iraq-related misperceptions, more than a variety of other types of news
consumers, and especially NPR and PBS users. Most strikingly, Fox watchers who
paid more attention to the channel were more likely to be misled.
I
know, let’s see how successful the media is in whipping up terror in the
U.S. From FireDogLake:
Excerpt:
Secretary
Hagel Claims ISIS Is ‘Threat To Every Interest We Have’, ‘Beyond Anything We’ve
Seen’
Sounds
like someone wants more war. Ooooh, a
threat to every interest we have, beyond anything we’ve seen. Scary.
You know what the biggest, scariest threat? Homelessness, Hunger, Ignorance, joblessness,
are they a threat to that?
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel attempted
to terrorize the American people Thursday by claiming ISIS was a threat to
every interest the US has and “beyond anything we’ve seen.” The dire statements
have, not surprisingly, led many observers to think the Obama Administration is
preparing a more involved military campaign against ISIS.
Though not-so-subtly skeptical of the
Syrian bombing campaign against the Assad regime, the Pentagon now appears to
be on board with launching attacks in Syria if they target ISIS with Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey saying ISIS would be a
threat as long as they had safe zones in Syria and that “This is an
organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of- days strategic vision and which
will eventually have to be defeated.” General Dempsey went on to call the
Syrian-Iraq border “essentially non-existent.”
So
how is Murdoch’s Fox News doing in ginning up terror in the U.S.? How about a “Fox News Poll” to gauge the
success of Fox News in selling a war weary nation on more more?
There’s
an avalanche of bad news for the Obama administration in the latest Fox News Poll
on foreign policy.
American voters feel:
-
Barack Obama is weak and indecisive.
-
The U.S. is less respected since Obama became president.
-
The U.S. should do more to stop the
Islamic extremist group ISIS.
-
Obama isn’t willing to do what it takes to defeat ISIS.
-
ISIS will try to attack the U.S. soon.
-
Embarrassed about Obama not having a strategy for dealing with ISIS.
-
Obama will try to “manage” ISIS rather than “defeat” it.
The poll also finds:
- For the first time, more voters than
not feel the U.S. is less safe today than before 9/11.
- Obama’s job approval is at record lows
on Syria, Iraq and terrorism. (Obama’s overall job approval matches his
all-time low.)
- Most
would tell Obama to kill extremists beheading Americans now, rather than
caution him against overreacting.
The new poll was released Wednesday,
hours before President Obama’s prime-time address to the nation about ISIS.
So,
I’d like to say to the people of America and the World “Grow Up” the boogey men
are in clear view, and they are not ISIS, they are not in Russia, they are not
in Syria, they are not in Iraq and they are not in Gaza.
So
while Murdoch’s media has the people of America lusting for revenge against the
Christian killing, apocalypse end-of-days visioning terrorist du jour the EU just
handed over the world’s media to Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB Fox News.
In
today’s media a headline like Fox’s
BSkyB Gets Greenlight from European Union to Create PAY TV GIANT doesn’t
merit a mention.
By
Patricia Baeten
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