Murdoch's Unraveling Empire and the Need for Civic Engagement

The only thing more remarkable than the news of the Rupert Murdoch hacking-bribery scandal itself is the rate of its unraveling—and Murdoch’s unraveling.  For this international kingmaker and media mogul— who built an empire on yellow journalism and destroying the lives of others— it seems rather fitting that his fall from grace would take place under such sensationalism and salaciousness.

Allegations that the now-defunct News of the World, Murdoch’s largest tabloid, maintained a massive phone hacking operation targeting 4,000 people—including politicians, celebrities and murder victims—has led to 10 arrests in the UK.  One of those arrested was Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s deputy at News International until she recently resigned.  And the top two officials at Scotland Yard quit their posts amid allegations that the corporation bribed the police.

And now Rupert, his son James and the ousted Brooks come before the British Parliament, humbled and hat in hand, to apologize and express their shock that this sort of wrongdoing even took place.

U.S. lawmakers have hinted that the phone hacking scandal is about to spill over into the States, as the FBI announced an investigation into alleged hacking of 9-11 victims and their families.  Meanwhile, Murdoch’s News Corp. has lost billions in just days, and rightly so, as he was forced to drop his bid to buy British company BSkyB.  The deal would have garnered him 40 percent of the UK broadcasting market.  And oddly, in a case of peculiar timing, the whistleblower, a News of the World reporter, mysteriously died.  And certainly there’s more to come.  After all, it is already known that Murdoch has paid about $655 million to erase charges of corporate espionage in the U.S.

Given the questionable ways in which the billionaire has conducted business over the years, the revelations should not come as a complete surprise.  As he destroyed unions, competitors and political enemies, Rupert Murdoch was allowed to make his own set of the shady rules while everyone watched.  And some were paid to look the other way.  When one person is allowed to amass such power and influence, graft and corruption are often a part of the process.  In Britain, the Murdoch family purportedly used criminals to do dirty jobs.  And like any proper organized crime boss, he owned politicians, carrying them in his pocket “like so many nickels and dimes.”

In America, Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News, masquerading as champions of working-class populism, offend our sensibilities as they endorse the most regressive rightwing policies.  The Post’s cartoon depiction of President Obama as an ape shot to death by two white police officers reflects a long history of racially offensive images and words promulgated by that newspaper.  Moreover, Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” Fox News Channel has operated as a media arm of the Republican Party, and an official network of the Tea Party movement.  Fox News has carved out its niche by offering race-baiting as standard fare, and offering a soapbox to personalities with ties to hate groups, including Glenn Beck.  Despite this, lawmakers have willingly appeared on the network.  And one must wonder if Murdoch bought his U.S. citizenship, which he needed as a prerequisite for owning American television stations.

With the mogul’s downfall and removal from the company he built now a plausible scenario, Rupert Murdoch provides a cautionary tale.  Journalism at its best acts as a disinfectant.  But through the use of race baiting and outright lying in the reporting of the so-called “news,” Murdoch has polluted the public discourse and has helped to defile and degrade our politics.  And while journalists at their best are supposed to act as a check on official power, News Corp. has reveled in its ability to accumulate power by any means and serve the interests of the greedy, a media version of the Koch brothers.  No scruples, no code of ethics, no social responsibility, just cozying up to the powerful and providing them cover.  Last year, News Corp. contributed $1 million each to the Republican Governors Association and the Chamber of Commerce on the grounds that it was “in the interest of the country and of all the shareholders ... that there be a fair amount of change in Washington.”

The Murdochs still control a great deal of U.S. media real estate, most of which includes TV and movie studios, and they will undoubtedly scramble to protect it.  But things now must change.  For all of the harm News Corp. has caused, something good must come out of it.  For one, society must prevent the circumstances that allow a future News Corp. to weld such power, unregulated and unaccountable, and unduly influence the affairs of government.

Democracy is stifled when a single player controls too much of the airwaves for its own good, and dresses up partisan hackery, unsubstantiated opinions and outright fabrications as the truth.  However, a disinterested, uninformed public—disengaged from public life, perhaps due to the bad economy and daily stressors and hardships, among other reasons—facilitates democratic rot as well.

The American Psychological Association defines civic engagement as “Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern.”  The New York Times defines civic engagement as “working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.”

Morally and civically responsible people see themselves as part of a larger social fabric.  They take ownership of society’s problems, and may even take action when necessary.  One organization that hopes to foster civic engagement and leadership in local communities is the Philadelphia-based Media Mobilizing Project.  In partnership with several other community organizations— Philadelphia Student Union, SEIU Healthcare PA, Casa Monarca, Unified Taxi Workers Alliance, and Logan CDC— MMP just opened five Public Computer Centers throughout the city to train people in computer skills and community journalism.  The centers were made possible with $18.2 million in federal stimulus funds.

MMP is a member of the Freedom Rings Partnership, which is led by the City of Philadelphia Division of Technology and the Urban Affairs Coalition, and is designed to provide computers, computer training and internet access to low-income communities.  A total of 77 centers in community centers and social service organizations throughout the city will train 15,000 people in digital literacy.  “MMP and the groups we are partnering with have led the way in improving education, working conditions, healthcare and quality of life for Philadelphians,” said Desi Burnette, Strategic Coordinator with Media Mobilizing Project. “This program will strengthen our ability to build community-driven solutions to the current economic crisis.”  And as Bryan Mercer, MMP Program Organizer noted, they will use twenty-first century technology to bring low-income communities together to solve their problems.  “In a time of budget cuts and unemployment, these Public Computer Centers offer a way to connect people – not just to the Internet, but to each other,” he said.

So, at a time when the policies of large corporations, disconnected from the community, are tearing the fabric of those very communities, it is good to see efforts to build them up.  And when media empires crumble, we must prepare others to fill the void.

Dr. King Is Needed In China, Though His Work Isn't Done in America

At first glance, Martin Luther King and China don't appear to belong together in the same sentence. For myself -- as a student of Asia, civil rights and international human rights -- the combination makes perfect sense. And if you look more closely, it should become obvious to you as well.

As America awaits the August 28 opening of the King National Memorial in Washington, D.C., this is a perfect time to reflect on the leader's accomplishments, legacy, and commitment to justice, equality and nonviolent social change. And lest we continue to run the risk of turning the man into a two-dimensional cutout stereotype, it is important to remember that the "dreamer" was far more -- a staunch antiwar activist who called for a radical revolution of American values.

A new documentary from award-winning journalist and filmmaker Kevin McKiernan takes a look an effort to bring Dr. King's message to China. The film, Bringing King to China, examines efforts by his daughter, Cáitrín -- who studied and taught in Beijing under a Fulbright after attending Stanford -- to introduce a play about Dr. King to a Chinese audience. The play, called Passages of Martin Luther King, was written by Clayborne Carson, a leading King scholar and Cáitrín's teacher at Stanford. Carson based his play on King's speeches and letters, even love letters from King to his wife.

From the beginning, the film almost begs us to ask the question: What can a twenty-something white woman teach the Chinese about the preeminent African-American civil rights leader? The answer is, apparently a great deal. China, now an emerging superpower and the world's second largest economy after the U.S., was already open to Dr. King's words. Video footage of lynchings and the police brutality of the Jim Crow South showed China what black people were up against. And following King's assassination, Mao Tse Tung gave a speech in Tiananmen Square praising the fallen leader. Some Chinese have tried to compare the two men, however problematic, given Mao's support of violence, and the ruthlessness of the Cultural Revolution.

Today, the communist-turned-hyper-capitalist nation is beating the U.S. at its own game of making money, and may someday eclipse its trading partner and debtor. And yet, while the official line in China is that racism doesn't exist there, the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, Tibetans and other minority groups tells a different story. And the popularity of Darlie or "Black Man Toothpaste," formerly known as Darkie, suggests a little education about black folks wouldn't hurt. Then there's the issue of freedom of speech and political repression in China.

Surprisingly, the play, which was performed by the National Theater Company of China, emerged unscathed from the Chinese government's censors. But that doesn't mean that the participants in the play did not self-censor, or at least second guess themselves and question whether their production would succeed and pass muster. The production marked the first time that a Chinese and African-American cast performed together in China. A Chinese man even played the role of King. And the theater company traveled to the U.S. to visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, and learn more about the man and the movement they would so ambitiously undertake to portray.

Bringing King to China is really several stories in one. Aside from chronicling the process of adapting Carson's work for a Chinese audience, the documentary is about bridging cultures. Americans and Chinese need to talk, figure things out and understand each other, much the way that the U.S. and Japan began a similar dialogue decades earlier. As the film pointed out, each culture has its own interpretation of reality. For example, while Americans might have viewed the 1989 image of a Chinese protestor walking in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square as the ultimate form of protest, a Chinese interpretation of that scene may have been one of government self-restraint. The film is also about the complexity of the civil rights movement, and the presence alongside King of important figures such as Stokely Carmichael, who preferred a more militant "black power" approach as an alternative to nonviolent civil disobedience.

But the documentary also tells the story of a father-daughter relationship, as well as the horrors of war. Kevin McKiernan was on assignment in war-torn Iraq in 2006 when Cáitrín mistakenly received news that her father had been killed by a suicide bomber in Northern Iraq. This happened at a time when China began to question America's presence in the Arab nation. The film's focus on Cáitrín's traumatic wartime experience is appropriate for a documentary about Martin Luther King, a pacifist who spoke out against the deadly and atrocious U.S. war in Vietnam.

Four years in the making, Bringing King to China does a laudable job of shedding a new light on the man by introducing him to a new audience. And in the process, it reveals glimmers of hope for the future, even as it exposes the shortcomings of China and the U.S., and the progress that has yet to be made in both countries.

A Chinese crew member in the film suggested that King is needed back in the America. I thought that was a profound statement, perhaps the most poignant throughout the documentary for its truth and clarity. Without question, King's work is undone in the States, and for proof of that one need only look at the protracted nature of King's three evils of racism, militarism and economic exploitation. This country's lingering wars, its coldhearted Tea Party austerity policies, its economic inequality and entrenched corporate power mean that the U.S. has not fully learned the lessons left by the man we will soon memorialize on the National Mall -- with a statue designed by a Chinese sculptor, no less. At the same time, King is needed in China, in Palestine and Israel, and in other places around the world.

Harmful Policies Are Giving All Americans a Black Experience

Whenever you take a look at a bad law that is on the books, or a policy that the government has put into place, you can bet that someone paid for that.  And in this most horrid of political seasons, you'd better believe that attached to each deplorable piece of legislation is a sales receipt.

Case in point: the proliferation of guns in our urban centers.  It is an irresponsible policy, to be sure.  Garry McCarthy, Chicago's new police superintendent, told some truth-telling that you rarely hear from a public official in his position these days.  "So here's what I want to tell you.  See, let's see if we can make a connection here.  Slavery.  Segregation.  Black codes.  Jim Crow.  What did they all have in common? Anybody getting' scared?  Government sponsored racism. I told you I wasn't afraid [of race]. I told you I wasn't afraid," said Chicago's top cop.  He added: "Now I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of the African American history in this country, and tell me if I'm crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children."

McCarthy received the predictable criticism from Andrew Breitbart, the gun lobby and others, but that doesn't change the fact that he spoke the truth.  In fact, their response validated the truthfulness of that which he spoke.  There is no reason for the sale, distribution and trafficking of these weapons of mass destruction, other than to kill people.  Corporate greed on the part of arms manufacturers has turned an obscure and anachronistic amendment dealing with militias into a license to kill, literally, on a massive scale.  The result is a gun for every American, with no system of licensing, registration and background checks.

And there is no valid or logical purpose for these guns, which injure nearly 100,000 Americans each year, killing a third of them and costing us $100 billion annually, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.  Of the large high-income nations, 80 percent of firearm deaths occur right here.  Over a million have died since Martin Luther King's assassination, and they are disproportionately black and brown.  In 2007, African Americans accounted for 13 percent of the population, but 49 of all homicide victims.  Black juveniles are five times more likely than their white peers to die from firearms.  And we export our violence to other countries.  The U.S. arms race fuels the Mexico drug war by supplying 70 percent of the weapons used by the drug traffickers in the carnage to our South.

The U.S. war on drugs has been an abysmal failure--primarily a war on poor people and black and brown people who fill the prisons and are separated from their families.  A color-coded law enforcement policy hunts for drug activity not in the affluent suburbs, but in the inner cities, where such activity is more conspicuous, out in the open.  President Jimmy Carter has called for an end to the global drug war, which was declared 40 years ago.  During that time, Carter noted, worldwide consumption of opiates has jumped 34.5 percent, cocaine 27 percent and marijuana 8.5 percent from 1998 to 2008.  Our drug policies have created a burgeoning prison population, busting at the seams.  With 743 people in prison for every 100,000, America boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Government spending on incarceration has skyrocketed.  And I don't see anyone challenging us for bragging rights.  Over three percent of the U.S. adult population finds itself under the supervision of the criminal justice system, either in prison, on probation or on parole.

Meanwhile, America's attempts to craft positive alternatives to incarceration are thwarted by private prison profiteers, who lobby lawmakers, network and contribute handily to political campaigns, according to a new report from the Justice Policy Institute.  Private prison companies work hard to put more people behind bars, and their efforts have paid off, for them that is.  Last year, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, generated over $2.9 billion in revenue.  The three major corporations have given $835,514 to candidates for federal office, over $6 million to state races, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lobbying.  In case you believe that the Arizona immigration debate was really about the interests of ordinary Americans and safe and secure borders, keep in mind that 30 of the 36 Arizona lawmakers who sponsored that state's atrocious anti-immigrant, anti-Latino law received contributions from the private prison lobby.  Apparently, in the land of opportunity, if a profit can be made from the suffering of others, that extra buck has been tagged and will be claimed by someone.

And someone seeks to profit from the nation's failing public schools, which funnel poor, black and brown children into a school-to-prison pipeline.  Groups such as the Koch Brothers--financiers to the Tea Party--and the Amway and Blackwater-affiliated DeVos family are pouring resources into radical rightwing schemes to privatize public funds, kill the public schools and pocket the money.  When Tea Party types such as the Koch Brothers peddle vouchers and "school choice," feigning concern about poor children and children of color, it is time to walk the other way.  

African-Americans and Latinos are the disproportionate victims of the deregulation craze, which led to predatory lending, the Great Recession, and a foreclosure crisis that decimated homeowners of color and eviscerated billions in private wealth.  And at 16 percent, black unemployment has reached Depression-era levels, double that for whites.  For black men, it is 17.5 percent, and for black teens, 41 percent.  In New York City, 34 percent of black men between 19 and 24 are out of work and out of luck.    

But really, Americans as a whole are out of luck-- the victims of deceptive policies created in the backrooms and boardrooms, by corporate lobbyists and rightwing think-tanks, and paid for by the fortunate few under a legalized system of bribery called campaign finance.  Bad policies gutted Main Street, and facilitated a concept known as the jobless recovery.  The wealthy--getting richer by the day and paying less in taxes-- are sitting on their money.  They only need the rest of us to the extent that they can squeeze more money out of us.  Yet, there are no new jobs, and the poor have nothing to spend.

Some of those who are elected to serve the people are really on the take, water carriers for the plutocracy.  They are paid by wealthy interests to bring ordinary people down, to strip them down to the bone.  Dressed up as shared sacrifice, a regressive regime of trickle-down economics and union-busting has hollowed out working people.  Corporate socialism and welfare for the banks has meant austerity and crippling budget cuts for the common folk.   The hallmark of such policies is America's upward income redistribution and rising inequality, the shame of the industrial world.  The richest 400 Americans own $1.37 trillion, which is more than bottom 50 percent of all U.S. households combined.

And to that extent, everyone is having a black experience now.  Get used to it, or do something about it. In boom times and bust, Black folks in America are used to being poor, of living without, and making do with very little or nothing.  They always made it through with the help of the church, the blues, and each other.  But somewhere in there, there was a movement, too, hint hint.