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Murdoch orders his chief assassin to dispatch Rudd
by baz Saturday, Aug 3 2013, 12:42pm
international / prose / post

Rudd had earned the ire of Murdoch before he was knifed by his then deputy, Gillard. Rudd simply would not do as he was told by the plutocrats, no matter how idiotic the errand. For instance, Murdoch had ordered Rudd to form a 'NATO of the South Pacific,' an imbecilic notion given the regional REALITY. Rudd ran the errand at a regional summit and failed, naturally. But Murdoch is unused to being defied, no matter how unrealistic the order/task from the CFR, so it was goodbye Rudd the narcissist and hello Gillard the Washington CFR doormat but also, as the 'boys' discovered later, the most inept, toxic and reviled politician on earth!

Plutocrat, Murdoch

Next, the game of musical chairs within the Labor Party and Rudd was PM again. The polls went straight up, as Gillard had pushed them so far down they had nowhere else to go; but to be fair, Rudd has a way with the moronic public which insular Gillard could only dream about.

Murdoch shocked by Rudd's resurgent popularity could not have Rudd at the helm again especially after Rupert had assisted in his demise. So a few meetings later and the News Ltd assassin was sent on his mission to ensure that Rudd would lose the upcoming election. [It seems that Murdoch's 'humbling' in the UK was very short lived indeed.] Rupert is back in business as king maker and breaker, his favourite sport -- who do those political fleas in Canberra think they're fucking with!

Now, before the assassin was dispatched on his dastardly mission there was no love lost between Murdoch and Rudd, whose public tiffs and major differences of opinion were becoming scandalous.

Can you imagine how the rest of the Labor Party feels about Rupert's feud with 'hand-mirror, I'll do it my way' Rudd, especially after the latest spill!

Now dear reader bear this in mind when reading the following SMH piece -- the issue is NOT about Rudd or Murdoch it is about Oz democracy and the global Plutocracy meddling in Oz political affairs:

Murdoch's vicious attacks on Rudd: it's business
by Paul Sheehan

The arrival of Col Allan in Australia is making a lot of people uneasy.

Allan is a man widely known inside News Corporation as Col Pot, a play on the name of a Cambodian genocidal dictator.

He is News Corp's most feared flamethrower in a company of flamethrowers and he has been sent to Australia by Rupert Murdoch himself. The purpose of his mission has become clear in recent days. One person who should rightly be disconcerted by Allan's sudden secondment to Australia is the head of News Corporation Australia, Kim Williams. Several other executives should also be leery, but they are not Allan's primary target.

His primary target is Kevin Rudd.

Why Murdoch wants Rudd to lose the coming federal election is not primarily political, it is commercial. News Corp hates the government's National Broadband Network (NBN). The company has formed a view that it poses a threat to the business model of by far its most important asset in Australia, the Foxtel cable TV monopoly it jointly owns with Telstra.

Murdoch has declared war on Rudd by dispatching his most trusted field general, Allan, whose reputation is built on his closeness to Murdoch and his long history of producing pungent front-page splashes and pugnacious campaigns as editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph and, for the past 12 years, The New York Post.

Allan's mission is to help consign Rudd to the dustbin of history reserved for failed leaders.

The ramp-up of the war effort has been rapid and intense.

Friday, July 26: the chief executive of News Corp, Robert Thomson, announced in New York that Allan would be returning to Australia to provide ''extra editorial leadership for our papers …''.

Monday, July 29: Allan is at work in Australia within 72 hours of the announcement.

Tuesday, July 30: he begins several days of meeting with editors. The message is simple and brutal: you have been going hard on Labor but now, with Rudd's revival in the opinion polls, you have to go harder.

Wednesday, July 31: he is spotted lunching with Lachlan Murdoch and other executives.

Friday, August 2: The Daily Telegraph depicts Rudd in a hoodie escaping from a bank he has just robbed, with the headline: ''Rudd's $733m hoist on people's savings''.

Yesterday, August 3, The Australian runs four negative headlines about the Rudd government on its front page alone, including ''Revealed: How Rudd blew $250bn''. The Daily Telegraph splashes with a front-page banner headline: ''Price of Labor - another huge budget shambles … and now we're $30bn in the red''. In Melbourne, the Herald-Sun took out page one with ''It's a ruddy mess''.

Rudd is a broad target. His own parliamentary colleagues could not stomach him and removed him from office after less than three years. After he rose like Lazarus to return as Prime Minister on June 26, one third of the cabinet departed rather than serve with him. His election-eve policy reversal on asylum-seekers was spectacular. His Papua New Guinea detention strategy was exposed as a bluff.

On June 26, Rupert Murdoch used Twitter to write: ''Australian public now totally disgusted with Labor Party wrecking country with it's sordid intrigues. Now for a quick election.'' Rudd's greatest failing, in the eyes of News Corp management, and the greatest threat he poses, is his $45+ billion NBN, a massive project announced without any serious costing. News Corp views this as a threat to the business model of its most important Australian asset, Foxtel, jointly owned with Telstra.

The company much prefers the Coalition's less costly but also less ambitious national broadband strategy. News Corp newspapers have reported the numerous failings and cost-over-runs of the NBN in hundreds of stories.

Although the Coalition's alternative is less costly, it offers an inferior capacity for downloading content at a time when consumer demand is shifting dramatically towards content-on-demand and content via computers.

This shift is reflected in the enormous run-up in the shares of the market leader in content-on-demand, Netflix. Shares in Netflix closed at $US246 (A$276) in New York on Friday, a prodigious run-up from its $52 price a year ago. Netflix now has a market valuation of $US14.5billion compared with $3 billion a year ago.

Foxtel has responded to this threat by launching its own content-on-demand product, FoxtelGo, and is launching an online-only version, FoxtelPlay.

Foxtel's co-parent, News Corp, is engaging in a more structural response.

It wants to kill the NBN threat at its ultimate source - Kevin Rudd.

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