Update: Dr. Evil And Mini-Me Go To Parliament

-by Noah

“These actions do not live up to the standards that we aspire to.”
                                               - James Murdoch, son of Rupert, Parliament July 19th.

Kinda brings new meaning to the phrase “If I knew you were coming, I’d have baked a pie!” Of course, the media are giving way too much coverage to the pie incident when there are deeper, more important issues at play in the Murdoch scandal. The Murdochs are damn lucky the guy didn’t have a machete or a black belt in some sort of deadly up close and personal martial art.

“I do not accept ultimate responsibility.”
                                             -Rupert Murdoch, Fascist Crank, Parliament July 19th.

Rupert Murdoch actually used the words “shocked and appalled” in yesterday’s testimony before Parliament in London! You can’t make this stuff up! There was also plenty of use of the usual dodges: “on-going investigation,” “I have no knowledge of that.” “I didn’t know.” Here they say “I don’t recall.” It was a whole day of weaseling. It was like Rupert Murdoch was auditioning for the part of Sgt. Schultz (“I know nothing. I see nothing.”) in a 2011 remake of Hogan’s Heroes. Here you had a man who is literally a kingmaker, a man who runs a multi-billion dollar empire that not only promotes certain candidates into office around the world for paybacks in the form of waivers to communications laws that allow him to expand his business and build his ever-expanding power, it strives and conspires to control those candidates once they are in office, even going so far as to place Murdoch people in important positions around them, whether it’s press flaks like David Cameron’s Andy Coulson, or, here, Bush’s Tony Snow. Police? Hell, you can just buy them.
 
Such a person would, by necessity, have to have his wits about him, wouldn’t he? Rupert says he runs the place but he doesn’t know what’s going on. Yet, his former editors, such as CNN’s Piers Morgan say they were in touch with Rupert on a weekly basis. That’s hardly being distant or being buffered by layers of management. Murdoch’s appearance yesterday was a textbook illustration of a conniver wanting it both ways. Out of one side of his jowly old mouth he says he doesn’t know what’s going on and puts on the doddering old geezer routine, while out of the other side he says he shouldn’t resign because he’s the best guy to fix what’s wrong.
 
I have to go back to the mobster comparison again. It was a classic example of the old mobster feigning illness in court in order to engender sympathy and get a better deal. In New York, we had a local godfather named Vinny “the chin” Gigante. He ran an empire, too. At one time, he was the most powerful crime boss in America. Yet, he went around his neighborhood in his pajamas and bathrobe, muttering to himself, in order to pretend he was just some crazy old coot. When he got before the judges as an old man, he really poured it on. He knew nothing. He played it to the hilt. Before he died, he admitted it was all an act, but, for 10 years, he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial. All the while, he ran his empire. Same deal with what we saw yesterday.
 
What a farce. First of all, the Murdochs were not even under oath. They could say anything or nothing, with impunity. James Murdoch talked about standards yet paid off someone with a million pounds. Standards? No wonder FOX “News” is the way it is.
 
Here’s some typical dialogue from yesterday’s dog and pony show, English-style, with Labor MP Watson questioning Rupert Murdoch-

Watson: “You’ve repeatedly stated that news Corp. has a zero tolerancetowards wrong doing by employees. Is that right?”
  
Rupert Murdoch: “Yes.”
 
Watson: "In October 2010, did you still believe it to be true when you said 'Let me be clear: We will vigorously pursue the truth and we will not tolerate wrongdoing'?"   
 
Rupert Murdoch: “Yes.”
 
Watson: “So, if you were not lying then, somebody lied to you. Who was it?”
 
Rupert Murdoch: “I don’t know. That’s what the police are investigating, and we are helping them with.”

 
Yeah right. He doesn’t remember. He was lied to but he doesn’t really pay all that much attention to the day to day. He doesn’t know. If someone lied to me, I’d know who it was. This same approach probably kept Rupert from getting expelled from school back around 70 years ago. Someone else is responsible! Not me! Round up the usual suspects! Put my most expensive cops on the case! Here’s more-

Watson: “Can I take you back to 2003? Are you aware that in March of that year, Rebekah Brooks gave evidence to this Committee admitting paying police?”
        
Rupert Murdoch: “I am now aware of that. I was not aware at the time. I am also aware that she amended that considerably, very quickly afterwards.”
 
Watson: "I think that she amended it seven or eight years afterwards.”
 
Rupert Murdoch: “Oh, I’m sorry.”
 
Watson: "Did you or anyone else at your organization investigate this at the time?”
 
Rupert Murdoch: “No.”

 
No one at News Corp. saw any need to investigate bribing police for information. Must be those standards that James Murdoch mentioned. There’s plenty more in the Parliament’s own transcript of the hearings.

Watson goes on to question Murdoch about a very high profile 2006 case involving the hacked voicemails and blackmail that we have been hearing about. The case resulted in admonishments from the judge, and received widespread media attention, yet Murdoch would have Watson and the rest of us believe that he, the great media baron knew nothing. More importantly, his company, which espoused a policy of “zero tolerance” for such wrongdoing didn’t draw his attention to it. Zero tolerance apparently has a whole different meaning in the land of News Corp.
 
I’ll give the British Parliament credit for a couple of things, although neither of them makes up for not putting such creeps as the Murdochs and their minions such as former News Of The Word editor Rebekah Brooks, who was questioned after the Murdochs, under oath. One was the intelligence of the questioning. The other is that, unlike hearings in our House or Senate, there was no grandstanding or self-aggrandizement on the part of the politicians.
 
It’s clear from yesterday’s testimony, that the Murdochs are buffering themselves from the wrongdoing that obviously never bothered them. The presented a picture of being detached or removed from things that were obviously company policy. Someone will be taking the fall, but they don’t intend for it to be them. Which employee or ex-employee will they sell down the river? Right now, you can put your money on Rebekah Brooks but, stay tuned
 
Sean Hoare, aka, the dead journalist, may have been the best or even only guy who could connect Murdoch and the Cameron government together in great detail. In my previous post, I raised the supposition of how would it look if Haldeman or Hunt had turned up dead at the beginning of the Watergate Scandal. While that would have set off quite a conflagration, perhaps I should have asked what would have happened if Woodward and Bernstein had been found face down in the Potomac.
 
The Murdochs and, no doubt, their man at No. 10 Downing Street once thought that just shutting down the News Of The World would make this whole thing go away, but it didn’t. Then a body turned up, the top two cops in Scotland Yard suddenly resigned over the police for sale issue, and Rebekah Brooks got arrested while police were retrieving her personal computer, phone and files from the garbage. The whole scandal leads to the question of how does a citizen deal with a legal system that is so corrupted by the money of the uber-powerful that it is in itself lawless; a legal system where more and more police and judges can be bought, given offers and orders that they can’t refuse. This is what will continue to happen as governments give waivers and tax breaks to the few uber-wealthy, the lords. Money equals power. That we are entering a state of complete lawlessness may very well be what the Repugs here, and their corporate overlords like Murdoch have been aiming for all along. It’s obvious. It’s certainly the logical end result of their policies. We are going medieval; merry olde England. Lords and serfs. Laws only written for the lords. If that’s the case and the law both there and here becomes even more of a farcical joke than it already is, then here’s my fantasy on how to deal with people like Murdoch, if only in my dark dreams.

If You Were Murdoch, Whom Would You Kill First?

By Noah

One of the first voices to blow the whistle on the phone hacking, former News Of The World journalist Sean Hoare, was found dead Monday in Watford, about 25 miles northwest of London. Police said the death was being investigated as unexplained but was not suspicious, according to Britain’s Press Association.
                                                         - The Associated Press, July 18th

 
Oh, no, not suspicious at all! How’s that for the ol’ legendary Brit reserve? Nothin’ to see here, folksies. Move along. It’s nice to know that England’s media is as ridiculous as ours. You might as well get your news from Dr. Seuss or Ted Baxter.
 
Imagine if, during Watergate, E. Howard Hunt or H.R. Haldeman had suddenly turned up dead. Not only will Sean Hoare forever be a former journalist, he happens to have turned up a quite dead journalist on the same day that Scotland Yard’s top guy and his deputy cut their careers short and resigned to go in a different direction, pursue other interests, and spend more time with the family. Swell. Imagine if here, the head of the FBI and his second in command decided, in one day, amid tales of rampant hacking, bribery and cover-ups, to do the same on the same day that a witness in the nation’s biggest federal case turned up dead.
 
Anything else happen to go along with the dead witness and the resignations of the England’s top two cops? Yep. The head of the shuttered News Of The World, Rebecca Brooks, was arrested the day before. Her home computer and cell phone were found in the trash on the curb (She claims her maid did it by mistake!), and Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, who was openly backed by Rupert Murdoch, cut a trip to South Africa short and sped home in time for Parliamentary hearings. Can Cameron’s own resignation be on the way? Are the office pools set up? Go ahead. Pick the day! Or, will the PM soon die an “unexpected natural death” by falling out of the highest window of the Tower Of London. Most likely, though, he may resign but the rest will be hushed.
 
The bigger question is; will the death of Sean Hoare silence those who might be inclined to blow more whistles, either in Britain, or here, or anywhere else? Will they now clam up, knowing that the last guy that spoke up is on ice in a morgue? This whole thing reeks of an old Avengers episode. Where are John Steed and Emma Peel. Better yet, where’s Bond, James Bond?
 


Now this Murdoch thing; this is what I call a scandal! I never care who’s sleeping with whom or who is or isn’t wearing panties or what drugs they did 40 years ago. But, show me total hypocrisy, and/or unbridled, evil, money wielding power demons getting a taste of the lash: now you’re talkin’! It’s even better when the come-uppance is a result of something the devil of the day created in the first place.
 
Like many have said, this really is like Watergate. I clearly remember reading my Washington Post one sticky June Washington morning back then and seeing the first tiny, buried two paragraph article about some “third rate break-in” at the Watergate Apartments and saying “Ah, Hah!” to myself with great glee! I knew Nixon was involved. I knew it! It just took some time to unravel and get to that particular sicko’s necessary demise. So it is with the burgeoning News Corp. scandal. From day one, I have expected other shoes to drop and, as I write this, it’s beginning to look like a tornado hit Imelda Marcos’s famous closet. 
 
Where will it end? Time will tell. But, if you ran a multi-national, multi-billion dollar media empire that was really much more than just a mere media empire, and, you were a plotting scheming fascist old coot with sociopathic dreams of control of the world, who couldn’t walk down the street without dropping some of his marbles on the sidewalk, what would you do to prevent those twisted dreams of empire from crumbling before you after, you had worked so hard at owning governments and police forces, ruining lives, bribing and buying influence with offers that your prey dare not refuse.
 
This is not just about England.
 
Already, Murdoch’s man in charge of the once credible Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton, has had to go bye-bye. He had worked for Murdoch since he was 15. I bet he got quite a severance package to keep silent. Dare I wonder now what would happen if it ever looked like he was about to spill the beans? I remember the mafia trials in my native New Jersey back in the late '60s and early '70s. It seemed like witnesses were having mysterious fatal auto accidents every damn day.
 
I’ve long felt that many of our biggest corporations act like mobsters. The recent fatal Massey Energy mine cave-ins in West Virginia are as good an example as any. 29 miners died. With all of the safety violations, you might as well politely call it negligent homicide at the very least. It’s just business; the typical way of business.
 
Corporations often even like to think of themselves as mobsters. Take the example of News Corp.’s News America operation. News America's honcho dude, Paul Carlucci, once motivated his sales team by playing them the famous clip from the movie The Untouchables where Al Capone repeatedly bashes a competitor’s skull into a bloody puddle of blood, bone, and pulp with a baseball bat right in the conference room. Nice folks there at News Corp. The mob analogy is all too perfect. If it walks like a… well, what’s the difference?
 
Not long ago, News America got itself sued by a small New Jersey company named FLOORgraphics. FLOORraphics was the company that put clever eye catching ads on the floors of places like supermarkets and large drugstores. They took News America to court when they felt compelled to charge News America with hacking their password protected computers and stealing their plans, strategies, proprietary info, and customers. There’s that hacking thing again! It couldn’t happen here? It already has. FLOORgraphics had a very good case. Murdoch’s company quickly settled for $29 million after about 2 days of adverse testimony. Then, News America just bought FLOORgraphics. Maybe they should have just taken that approach to begin with, but, alas, it doesn’t look like that’s News Corp.’s style. Betta ta be a gangsta.
 
So, you see, only a very naïve or unfathomably stupid person could ever seriously believe that News Corp. behaves any differently here than they do in Britain. I eagerly look forward to hearing more shoes dropping. 

“We reject the notion that the issues at News International are somehow indicative of our culture.”

So says News Corp.’s press bozo Jack Horner (if that’s his real name). He presumably even said it with a straight face; put it in writing too, on News Corp letterhead and everything! But, the truth is that News Corp. has paid out close to $655 million to make charges of corporate espionage, including hacking, disappear. One has to ask, how would such a company pay to make any of us go away, including real permanent like.
 
Paul Carlucci, the baseball bat enthusiast, was recently promoted to head up the New York Post. There’s a pattern here. Obviously, Murdoch likes a certain kind of lieutenant. Do I even have to bring up Roger Ailes of FOX News? I won’t. Enough has been written about him, but, with any luck, we’ll hear a lot more very soon. I would so love to see him doing the perp walk. More likely, though, Murdoch’s money will talk.
 
Still, there’s plenty of potential in the Murdoch scandal. David Cameron’s press flak, Andy Coulson was a Murdoch installation. He’s resigned and been arrested. Kinda makes you wonder about so-called President Bush’s press flak Tony Snow, another “ex”-Murdoch guy doesn’t it? Murdoch’s filthy tentacles are seemingly everywhere. He even stockpiles potential candidates for President on his network. And, what about Rudy Giuliani’s close personal friend, Bernie Kerik, the guy who nearly became Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security but ended up in jail instead?
 
Murdoch reportedly paid Kerik’s galpal, Judith Regan at least $10 million for her silence when it looked like she might have so much to reveal about Kerik that it could adversely affect Giuliani’s Presidential bid. Murdoch also backed her Regan Books publishing company and she once had her own show on FOX “News.”
 
Before her big $10 million payday, it was reported that Regan was going to say in court that she had been ordered to lie to federal prosecutors about one of Kerik’s controversies. And, I can’t resist just one little thing about Roger Ailes: In February of this very year, a lawsuit revealed that it was Ailes who told her to lie.  
   
The FBI probes have begun. Will they be real, in depth ones? Probably not, but we may find out something about the phones of 9/11 victims and their families being hacked here just like after the subway terror attacks in England.
 
It’s obvious that Murdoch has always hired people like himself and fish does always rot from the head on down all the way to vermin in suits like Sean Hannity and racist goofballs like Eric Bolling or Bill-O who found it surprising that African-Americans can eat in a restaurant without using the M-F word. FOX “News” never pays the price, though. If having Bush’s own cousin, John Ellis call the election for Bush from his position at the head of the FOX News desk on election night 2000, thus influencing all of the other networks to do the same, even though the evidence simply wasn’t there, didn’t set off bells and everything that has followed on FOX hasn’t, what would? It’ll never happen but, to me, Murdoch should have been tried and hung for treason long ago. The last decade would have been a whole lot better and we’d have more optimism about the next one. One man can make a difference.  



[Noah's update will be posted here at 8am, PT]

Moving On-- Always The Wrong Thing To Do With Criminal Elites

Lately there's been another stir about prosecuting Bush Regime war criminals, particularly Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld and Bush himself.

A US human rights group has called on foreign governments to prosecute George W Bush and some of his senior officials for war crimes if the Obama administration fails to investigate a growing body of evidence against the former president over the use of torture.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday that the US authorities were legally obliged to investigate the top echelons of the Bush administration over crimes such as torture, abduction and other mistreatment of prisoners. It says that the former administration's legal team was part of the conspiracy in preparing opinions authorising abuses that they knew to have no standing in US or international law.

It could happen... but it would require a revolution here in America first-- and not the kind of fascist one more likely than the necessary democratic one. Yesterday we saw how-- in the midst of one outrageous revelation after another regarding Rupert Murdoch's fascistic and criminal empire, one of his handmaidens, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, urged Congress to get over it and move along. The same day, writing about the systemic criminality of Murdoch's enterprises, David Carr touched on why it's so important to not just move along in these kinds of cases where the rich, powerful and privileged go astray of the law, usually with impunity (and a knowledge of immunity, should it ever be needed).

In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely disparage its competitors.

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

The complaint stated that the breach was traced to an I.P. address registered to News America and that after the break-in, Floorgraphics lost contracts from Safeway, Winn-Dixie and Piggly Wiggly.

Much of the lawsuit was based on the testimony of Robert Emmel, a former News America executive who had become a whistle-blower. After a few days of testimony, the News Corporation had heard enough. It settled with Floorgraphics for $29.5 million and then, days later, bought it, even though it reportedly had sales of less than $1 million.

But the problems continued, and keeping a lid on News America turned out to be a busy and expensive exercise. At the beginning of this year, it paid out $125 million to Insignia Systems to settle allegations of anticompetitive behavior and violations of antitrust laws. And in the most costly payout, it spent half a billion dollars in 2010 on another settlement, just days before the case was scheduled to go to trial. The plaintiff, Valassis Communications, had already won a $300 million verdict in Michigan, but dropped the lawsuit in exchange for $500 million and an agreement to cooperate on certain ventures going forward.

The News Corporation is a very large, well-capitalized company, but that single payout to Valassis represented one-fifth of the company’s net income in 2010 and matched the earnings of the entire newspaper and information division that News America was a part of.

Because consumers (and journalists) don’t much care who owns the coupon machine in the snack aisle, the cases have not received much attention. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t a useful window into the broader culture at the News Corporation.

News America was led by Paul V. Carlucci, who, according to Forbes, used to show the sales staff the scene in “The Untouchables” in which Al Capone beats a man to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Emmel testified that Mr. Carlucci was clear about the guiding corporate philosophy.

According to Mr. Emmel’s testimony, Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy-- “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmelt testified-- then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.”

Clearly, given the size of the payouts, along with the evidence and testimony in the lawsuits, the News Corporation must have known it had another rogue on its hands, one who needed to be dealt with. After all, Mr. Carlucci, who became chairman and chief executive of News America in 1997, had overseen a division that had drawn the scrutiny of government investigators and set off lawsuits that chipped away at the bottom line.

Over the last several months, we've been looking at how letting prominent American fascists who aided the Germans-- families like the DuPonts, Fords, Rockefellers and Bushs, to name just four-- escape without charges, has led to a sense that their crimes were not crimes at all and that their treachery and treason could be repeated. Last night I was reading in The Nazi Hydra In America about how Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Argentina helped dispose of tons of gold looted by the Nazis from their victims, including from the dental work of Jews who were killed in concentration camps. I came across a familiar name, Degussa, a company that was smelting dental gold and that was never punished and has gone on to a career of crimes that is simply breathtaking.

Degussa was a large German firm engaged in metal refining and production of chemicals, including Zyklon-B cyanide tablets used in the gas chambers. The Zyklon-B tablets were produced by Degesch, which was owned by Degussa and IG Farben, a chemical concern that was dissolved after the war. Degussa was also the firm that supplied the uranium for the Nazis' atomic bomb project. Recently, Degussa spoke persons have acknowledged ties between Degussa and I.G. Farben during the war. Much of the information surfacing recently about Degussa comes from a lawsuit filed in New Jersey. Degussa held an exclusive contract with the Nazis for re-smelting items taken from the Jews in the concentration camps, including dental gold. There was so much gold being taken from the victims at Auschwitz that Degussa built a smelter there. According to Oberstrumbannfuhrer Rudoff Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, the daily yield of gold at the camp was 24 pounds.

More recently, Degussa’s role in nuclear proliferation has been brought to light in the film documentary Stealing the Fire. The filmmakers document the trial of Karl-Heinz Schaab, who was tried for treason in Munich. Schaab is the first person in the world convicted of atomic espionage in an open trial in the last fifty years. He sold top secret documents stolen from Germany to Saddam Hussein, and traveled to Baghdad numerous times to help Iraq build an atomic bomb. Schaab was linked to Degussa and Leybold, a Degussa subsidiary. He received an extremely light sentence upon conviction. He was fined only 100,000 deutsche-marks fine and sentenced to 5 years of probation.

However, there is more than meets the eye to the light sentence handed out to Schaab. After the war, Gernot Zippe, known as the "father of the centrifuge" and an employee of Degussa was of great interest to the militaries of several industrialized nations. Zippe was captured by the Russians, and helped them build their atomic bomb. He was returned to the west in 1956. On his return, the CIA immediately snapped him up to work on US centrifuge technology, which is critical in separating isotopes of uranium. Through a convoluted path, a variant of Zippe’s centrifuge technology was discovered in Iraq in 1996. Due to the murky underworld of arms dealing, Degussa was spared charges of treason, largely due to its connections with American defense contractors, such as Du Pont. Schaab was a convenient fall guy. Iraq’s Scud-b missile technology can be described as 90% German and its atomic technology as 60% German.

Additionally, in 1990 Degussa was fined $800,000 for illegally re-exporting nuclear weapons-related material to North Korea. The firm was also implicated in exporting poisonous gas to Libya. Degussa was also a large contributor to the election campaign of George W. Bush. As early as June 1999, Degussa had contributed $1,950.67 It should be noted that Degussa is a German company contributing to an American election campaign. Today Degussa is a worldwide conglomerate reporting sales of 11.8 trillion Euro dollars. Once again, a corporation associated with the Nazis has advanced unencumbered, since the end of the war. Degussa also represents a corporation that has been so thoroughly corrupted with its past dealings with the Nazis that it is beyond reform. It should be broken up before its dealings can provoke another war. With the rise of fascism globally, the best chance of the fascist, regaining control still lies in provoking another war.

DeMint Stakes His Political Future On Murdoch Being Too Big To Jail... Or Even Fail

I'm starting to lose track of the mayhem inside the fascistic Murdoch media empire as the criminal regime starts unraveling. Over the weekend the head of his operations in the U.K., Rebekah Brooks, resigned and was subsequently arrested "in connection with allegations of corruption and phone hacking." Les Hinton, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and head of Dow Jones, who is thought to be neck-deep in the U.K. scandal, was shoved overboard last week. The noose beginning to close, next to go was the head of Scotland Yard.

Britain's top police officer resigned Sunday and Rupert Murdoch's former aide Rebekah Brooks was arrested as the phone hacking scandal finally tore into the heart of the British establishment.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson said he was quitting due to speculation about his links to Murdoch's empire and the force's botched investigation into hacking at the now-defunct News of the World tabloid.

His shock announcement came just hours after police arrested Brooks-- who resigned on Friday as head of News International, Murdoch's British newspaper arm-- on suspicion of phone-hacking and bribing police.

...Stephenson was linked to former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis [who was arrested last week] in reports Sunday which said the police chief accepted a five-week stay earlier this year at a luxury health spa where Wallis was a PR consultant.

...Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband piled on the pressure by calling for Murdoch's British media interests to be dismantled, telling the Observer newspaper: "I think he has too much power over British public life."

Abandoning his earlier defiance, Murdoch placed ads in most of Britain's Sunday newspapers for a second day, this time entitled "Putting right what's gone wrong" and promising to fully cooperate with police.

Prime Minister David Cameron has meanwhile faced questions about his decision to invite his former media chief Andy Coulson [arrested earlier this month], another ex-News of the World editor, to his country residence in March, two months after Coulson quit Downing Street.

Australia has also kicked off an investigation of Murdoch's criminal activities in his homeland and the FBI is either investigating or covering up... whatever they do these days. Several members of Congress, including heavyweight Democrats like Jay Rockefeller and Dick Durbin (usually a good reflection of Obama's thinking), as well as Republican Homeland Security Committee Peter King are clamoring for congressional investigations into what Murdoch has been up to in this country. It is widely suspected that his organization was illegally tapping phone lines here-- including of the families of the 9/11 victims-- just as he was doing in the U.K. Actor Jude Law has accused the Murdoch organization of hacking his phone on U.S. soil.

Murdoch's American empire is also said to be 'exploding and unravelling' as he faces the threat of losing control of his Fox and other cable networks if found guilty of breaching anti-corruption laws.

As panic started to set in in right-wing circles that their primary media ally could be neutered just as election season gets rolling, reactionaries wondered who would stop the hemorrhaging. As if on cue, along came Mary Jim DeMint, the fascist senator from South Carolina. DeMint told David Gregory on Meet The Press yesterday that the Senate should leave the Murdoch scandal alone and concentrate on the GOP's latest repackaging of the widely discredited Ryan budget, now being called "cut, cap and balance."

DeMint won't be able to prevent a Senate investigation. Darrell Issa, who heads up the House committee that should be investigating Murdoch's activities, is strictly about partisan witch hunts and, as expected, he is refusing to do anything at all. But investors in News Corp are getting antsy and are starting to focus on James Murdoch, the person in the organization who was authorizing the bribes and other expenses for the criminal activities.

John Whittingdale MP, the chairman of the [culture, media and sport select] committee, said they would be particularly keen to hear Mr Murdoch clarify remarks he made last week that executives at News International, the publisher of the News of the World, had misled MPs in earlier appearances in 2007 and 2009 by making statements about the scandal “without being in full possession of the facts."

Tom Watson, a Labour member of the committee, said he also expected Mr Murdoch to be questioned about what he meant when he said, hours after closing down the Sunday tabloid, that he had approved out-of-court settlements over phone hacking when he “did not have a complete picture.”

Mr Watson has written to Richard Alderman, director of the Serious Fraud Office, drawing his attention to these payments, and others, and asking if he will consider investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty by directors of the relevant News Corp subsidiaries, including Mr Murdoch.

One investor, whose holding is about one per cent of BSkyB shares, said at the weekend: “At the moment, we are trying to strike a balance. James doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong and he has been a good chairman of the company.

“On the other hand, we all know that mud sticks and we wouldn’t want people saying they were going to cancel subscriptions in Sky because of the Murdoch association.”

Another investor, with a larger holding, added: “This committee meeting is going to be box-office television. It’s a pity Sky can’t put it on pay-per-view.

“But to be serious, if on television he came across as someone with something to hide, or he got angry with MPs or, who know, anything might happen, you might take a view that Sky could be affected and it would be better not to have the Murdoch name on the chairmanship.”

A third investor added: “We think we should have a non-Murdoch chairman, but we’ll wait to see what Tuesday brings. Having said that, I would be more worried if I was a News Corp shareholder. In the States, there is more than a sense that things aren’t real till they’ve happened on television.”