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THE MURDOCH DOCTRINE: HAIL THE RUINOUS ORTHODOXY [Easier to read at http://peterstrempel.com/2013/04/08/the-murdoch-doctrine-hail-the-ruinous-orthodoxy ] What do we owe a titan of international capitalism? At the very least, to take what he says seriously. Rupert Murdoch, in his speech at the Institute of Public Affairs 70th anniversary dinner (Melbourne, 4 April 2013)[1], does not make that easy. His method consists of caricaturing his imagined opponents, tilting at straw men, ignoring all contrary evidence, and then failing to explain his own philosophy with any clarity or detail. Nonetheless, the claims he makes, however unsatisfactory in their expression, are important, all the more so as they represent a capitalist orthodoxy. They deserve to be treated as if the best case, rather than his case, had been made in their favour.[2] Murdoch merits identification as the archetypal hero of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, the most obvious manifestations of a revolutionary shift in post-war Western political economy away from social conscience and responsibility, towards a harshly dog-eat-dog, monetised, solely economic conception of politics, society, and human aspirations. The economic dimension of that shift is probably most easily defined as the 'Washington Consensus' about policy settings to be pursued world-wide. That description, said to have been coined by free market economist John Williamson in the 1980s,[3] defines 'a set of economic institutions and policies alleged to have been designed by the United States to globalize American capitalism and its associated cultural system'[4], offering 'the “lowest common denominator of policy advice” directed at mostly Latin American countries by the IMF, the World Bank, and other Washington-based international economic institutions and think tanks'.[5]. This 'advice' prominently includes reduced spending on public goods and services, privatisation of public assets and services, balanced budgets, removal of domestic industry protection from foreign competition, removal of barriers to direct foreign investment, the free transfer of capital, and protection of property rights for wealthy individuals and investors.[6] What Murdoch spoke about at the Melbourne dinner was no more or less than a re-statement of these core principles, dressed up as the sole means of achieving 'opportunity' and 'success'. This should surprise no one. Murdoch was highly visible grasping at these policy settings to establish in the 1980s and 1990s what would become the second largest global media empire. In the process he broke labour unions, reduced journalism to stenographic typing and shorthand speeds while removing Forth Estate principles, integrity and critical analysis, concentrated media ownership, thus reducing news media diversity of analysis and opinions, monetised everything that moved, and shifted capital around in complex global legerdemain transactions to minimise taxation and to redistribute wealth from local economies into his supra-national News Corporation. After the calamitous 1987 stock market collapse he also pioneered the idea of 'too big to fail' when he convinced his creditor bankers that calling in their debts at that point would leave them all with little or nothing. So, instead, he was able to extend his lines of credit and fight his way out of insolvency. No mean feat, but one possible only because his creditors didn't foreclose, as they tend to do with brutal predictability when the debts accrue to smaller players, like household mortgagees and small businesses. Size, it seems, does matter. The Washington Consensus has certainly worked for Murdoch personally, and, one must suppose, for most of the people he has contact with, which excludes representatives of about 99 per cent of the planet's less fortunate inhabitants. That is to say, Murdoch is likely to have been fairly insulated from every-day realities confronting most people of even relative affluence. This insulation is what makes it ungraceful of him to suggest that state regulation of the media might limit freedom of speech, when what he really means is that it might threaten his oligopoly position of enormous power and influence to propagandise for or against specific political parties, leaders, and governments via his news media outlets. It also makes him disingenuous when he complains that – … instead of hearing about new initiatives that would make Australia more competitive and open up new opportunities for the Australian people, we hear more of the class warfare rhetoric that has proved so toxic and so damaging for older nations. And, here is something else we are not hearing about: we must argue the morality of free markets and the immorality of markets that are not free. If there is a rhetoric of class warfare, it is coming from an extremely right-shifted political grouping which has characterised what used to be the moderate centre ground as 'socialism', influenced a pronounced shift to the right of all mainstream parties, and propagandised the idea that any public benefit not accruing to private enterprise is wasteful 'welfareism'. Such rhetoric is indeed toxic, and has laid to waste the entire American middle class. It seems likely that Murdoch's project for Australia does not look substantially different, and his media outlets certainly heavily promote the message and prophets of that vision. But then he talks morality! And he suggests that notionally free markets, which are actually highly distorted by unregulated corporate conduct, are somehow imbued with a higher moral character than those in which markets are state-regulated. The patent falsehood of such an assertion is contained in the myriad of undisputed facts explaining the 2007 Wall Street meltdown and its consequences over the ensuing years.[7] Murdoch was less than an innocent bystander in the Wall Street milieu, particularly when it is noted that none of his papers reported or warned of flagrantly unethical and illegal practices. They didn't even explain the nature of the instruments of such practices, like derivatives and credit default swaps. It seems almost fitting that just days before Murdoch's speech, the New York Times published a lengthy opinion piece by one of the architects of Reaganomics, and long-standing Republican, David Stockman, who was scathing both about Washington Consensus policies and the ethics, or lack of them, with which they were pursued within the US public and private sectors.[8] Whatever anyone might think of Murdoch, he is no fool. For him to pursue as simplistic and counterfactual a message as moral superiority for practices so demonstrably devoid of ethics strongly suggests a motivation beyond rhetorical hyperbole. Typically, those of us who believe in free markets make our arguments by extolling the market's economic superiority. But I believe we need to do something very different from what we are used to. We need to defend the market on precisely the grounds that its critics attack it: on justice and fairness. Yes, the morality of free markets. Outside your typical Western university, most people these days do not question the free market's superiority when it comes to performance. Even the so-called Communists in China have come around to the view that Adam Smith is a more reliable guide for a nation than Karl Marx or Chairman Mao. There is Murdoch's real intent. To encourage the gathered guests at the dinner he was speaking at to engage in a propaganda undertaking, focused on discrediting educated, articulate critics of the Washington Consensus, and preaching the unchanged 1980s gospel of an imaginary Adam Smith laissez faire capitalism. No matter that the 1980s re-interpretation of Smith ignored that he also wrote the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and conceived of free trade as desirable only when restrained by an ingrained sense of ethics he took for granted as human decency, and not solely ordained by law, whose complete absence today would have shocked him just as surely as it would have the American founding fathers. Murdoch appears impervious to the reality that free markets in themselves are imbued with no morality at all, because ethics is a human quality, and only human actions give expression to moral qualities, good or bad. Historical experience strongly suggests that the progressive abolition in the West of legal restraints on capitalist excesses, but in line with 'deregulation', exposed a frightening absence of ethics in business people, and a willingness to allow a shockingly barbarian greed to override all moral principles, including even a semblance of empathy with those who were crushed by the failure of the Washington doctrine, and then even blamed for this misfortune as if they had just not worked hard enough. Not a hint in the Murdoch press that the losers are quite commonly the victims of lying, cheating, criminally negligent, larcenous public administrators and private businesspeople. Murdoch's strategy, then, is simple revisionism, glossing over the catastrophic failures of the free market as conceived of in the Washington Consensus, and focusing solely on selective economic indicators, none of which can hide the increasing concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, and the creeping growth in poverty that threatens to extinguish the entire Western post-war economic miracle. What of the concerns of many millions of less-than-rich people in the West? What of those concerns in Australia? Murdoch says: 'Placating a nation is not leading a nation.' Reframing that statement in light of his aims, it becomes clear that he sees no rôle for political leadership, or responsiveness to popular aspirations at all. Government should be about facilitating only free enterprise as an end in itself, making of politicians and public servants mere administrators of fixed and incontestable economic policies. That he and others like him are a
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