The Murdoch Thiefdom....

Am I being blagged, hacked or tapped? First, there is Peter Oborne’s piece about the Fourth Reich, a term that I coined years ago. And checking back on old posts there have been several that have been followed later in the meeja. In one of my posts a couple of weeks ago, I made mention of the doorstepping of a Red Top Editor by another hack, which he didn’t like one little bit. A reader reminded me that the editor in question was none other than Kelvin Mackenzie, the awesome boss of the Sun at that time. Now I read in the excellent Oldie magazine a piece on the very same topic by John Sweeney. It was he who did the door-stepping.

It’s a funny old world. About a year ago we heard a lot of ordure from St Vince Cable and others about tax-havens. Then it all went quiet. Maybe this was because they read my blog putting the record straight (‘Tax havens galore’), but there could be another reason.

Could it be that word went out from Murdoch Towers?

News Corpse is based not in New York or Washington, as one might expect, but in that great tax haven, the state of Delaware. One benefit to the Dirty Digger is that it has paid little or no UK corporation tax on huge UK profits over a good many years. Its overall tax rate was about 6% in 1999, according to the Economist.  It has over 150 subsidiaries in either tax havens or countries where there is a favourable tax regime, with companies in Luxembourg, the Netherlands (where the egregious Bono has also stashed his wedge), Switzerland, Gibraltar, Cayman, the Virgin Island, Panama, Singapore, Hong Kong and Mauritius.

They are in good company.

It is reported that in 2008, 83 of the 100 largest US corporations had subsidiaries in tax havens. No less than 99 out of 100 of the largest European companies have off-shore subsidiaries. The NAO reported in 2007 that 30% of the UK’s biggest businesses paid no tax at all in the previous year. ENRON had 881 off-shore subsidiaries, much good it did them. CITIGROUP has 427. Bernie Madoff, Lehman Brothers and AIG were also thoroughly entrenched off-shore.

So where are the biggest tax havens? Not in some exotic palm-fringed tropical paradise, but in Manhattan and the City. And don’t imagine that there is a bank in the Caribbean with its strong room stuffed with money. Deposits are recycled back to e.g. the City immediately which is how Alistair Darling was able to purloin £830 million of Manx deposits on the crash of KSF, the Icelandic bank.  The Cayman Islands holds nearly USD 2 trillion of deposits, three-quarters of the world’s hedge funds, and 80,000 companies. But they are mostly just brass plates.

Here is how it all works.

If you want to hide your stash from your soon-to-be-divorced wife, you set up a secret front company. How? Well, just look at the small ads in your In-flight magazine or finance journal. There will be advertisers who will set one up for you at modest cost and not even check your identity. This means that what they don’t know they can’t reveal! Most of these firms are not in so-called ‘tax havens’ but in the US, Europe and the UK. Better still, issue bearer shares. (Now here’s a funny thing; these are illegal in the tax haven of the Isle of Man but not in England).

But if you are a multi-national, like News Corp, it gets more interesting.

Let us suppose that our business is cocoa production in Ghana. This is set up as a separate company from our parent which is based in London. We also have a financial services company based in Panama. So all the profit is generated in Ghana. But the Panama end lends it money and charges  interest at least equal to the profit. This is transferred back to Panama (or to another tax-haven if you really want to get complicated). So all the profit is filtered out to a no-tax regime. The Ghanaian tax people get nothing because there is no tax liability. The UK taxman ditto. Basically, you shift profits to   a low- or no-tax regime and the costs to a high tax country where they can be set against tax.

It is estimated that the tax loss on the deposits of wealthy individuals is about two-and-a-half times the total of global aid money. But individual deposits pale into insignificance compared with those of multi-nationals.

So now you know why capital flight from Africa exceeds foreign aid, which, of course could be abolished if ‘off-shore’ was likewise.

The Great US Budget Baseline Scandal...

Duped again. The scales over the eyes of the American public are once again being lifted. Although no secret, the dynamics of baselline budgeting are in the limelight. As such, the dark secrets of the process are illuminated for all to see.

Our national and in some cases state practice of baseline budgeting is simple. We calculate expenses versus income including gains or losses over a given fiscal year and use that as a baseline. Then we legislate calculations that provide annual percentage increases in recurrent spending such as welfare, medicare, aid to education etc. These percentage increases are annually re-calculated for future years and are then fixed into the budget in advance of any given fiscal year.

Then we debate next year's actual budget without reference to percentage increases previously legislated. The result is a de facto increase in spending in spite of any newly agreed and legislated budget cuts. Take for example, education which may have a previously legislated percentage increase for next year of 6%, or (for purposes of illustration) 20 billion dollars. Next, we impose spending cuts for next year of say 10 billion and crow about our parsimony to anyone who cares to listen. But in fact, spending has increased owing to the baseline principle.

The only people in Washington that I believe to be serious about actually reducing spending and balancing the national budget and reducing the size of government are the Tea Party folks. Personality wise, they are not my favorite people. The enter the scene with a strong dose of holier than thou, hard core religion, extreme patriotism and an unshakable belief that by feeding the rich, the poor will benefit. Perhaps, but then again perhaps not.

Given the Tea Party's dedication to free market principles, the rich will become richer but not necessarily the poor, or middle class. This is because of the greed factors that have taken possession of American enterprise over the past several decades. Public welfare has been eclipsed by the obsessive accumulation of wealth. Sure, the rich give to charity, but in the form of enormous tax write-offs.

The case for the super poor is no better. According to our Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, 40% of the children born today will be eligible to receive food stamps. Poverty is feeding on itself in the USA and is understandably getting less healthy as a result.

Concepts are direly needed to dramatically relieve poverty and dramatically revive the economic strength of the middle class. To be sure, give away and welfare programs are not the solution. They only create dependencies which in turn expands the poverty base.

Nobody in power today wants to address these issues in a practical manner. All we get is a bunch of blah, blah, blah without any concrete evidence of serious concern on politicians parts, or workable solutions.

In the meantime, we are behaving like spoiled brats arguing amongst ourselves in full view of the world at large. We should be ashamed of ourselves. My take is that we will continue to wash our dirty laundry with even more exposure and revelations before, during and well after the issue of America's debt ceiling is decided. It would appear that America's capacity to tackle and resolve hard issues has turned sour. Pity that.

Sticky sex in sleepy Suffolk........

It must be true; I read it in the papers.

All this stuff about the papers concocting stories takes me back to 1970, when I was living in a small country town; you know the sort of place – a one horse town where the horse got up and left.

One of the Sundays – it may well have been the Screws of the World - decided to run a piece about the lubricious sex lives of the local yokels, with special reference to ‘treacle parties’. ‘The what?’ you may well ask.

The general idea was that couples on naughtiness bent would gather together in a convenient house of a Saturday night, strip off all their clothes, pour treacle all over each other and then lick it off. I decided to pursue this story (purely in the interests of research, you will understand). I found a reliable witness in the person of a local farmer’s wife who had been a Land Girl at the time.

Sure enough she confirmed the truth of it; she told me that she had attended many such parties. She was a free spirit who was quite capable of doing an impromptu striptease in the bar of the Farmer’s Arms of a Saturday night.

Except:

It was not Lyons Golden Syrup, which was on the ration.

It was maple syrup.

It was not 60’s swingers gingering up their wife swapping parties.

It all took place in 1942 when the Yanks came to town big time, not 1970.

And it was not local couples; it was young girls or wives, whose husbands were away in the services, doing their bit to improve morale amongst members of the USAAC.

But, as they say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

            

Dead Aid.......

The collecting tins are out again, this time for yet another East African famine appeal. There will be TV hotlines to take our donations and endless pictures of starving infants.

So what is to be done?                                     

Ethiopia was once a green country that could feed its people. For many years now, neither has been the case. Why? I suspect that there is a whole catalogue of reasons. One is deforestation. I have seen this at first hand in African countries. In Zamfara, bordering Niger and getting towards the desert belt the cutting-down of huge, mature trees was truly shocking. There was no forestry management, no selection, and no replacement programme – just destruction. I am pretty sure that in ten years time, the farms in that region, that seemed quite prosperous, will be no more.

In Malawi under Banda, cutting down indigenous trees without a permit was a serious crime and the forests were well preserved. Each year there was a National Tree Planting Day when every family was obliged to plant one tree. When the old man was deposed this discipline vanished overnight. The forests were invaded for charcoal; on one occasion I drove past a large area of woodland in the morning; when I returned in the evening it had gone – totally!

One effect of deforestation was that the rivers and streams feeding Lake Malawi now began to run freely, carrying topsoil into the Lake. This had two effects. Without trees to bind the thin soil layer it rapidly disappeared and the land became infertile. The soil began to silt-up the southern end of the Lake were it flows into the Shire River. This affected navigation on the lake itself and in the river. The reduced water flow in the Shire began to affect the hydro electric power station at Walker’s Ferry which is the main source of power for the region. The silting in the lake encouraged the growth of vegetation which brought bilharzia with the snails feeding on the water plants. The vegetation also meant the proliferation of hippo in a densely populated area.

In such ways are formerly prosperous areas brought down to subsistence only.

Then there is the issue of over-population. The main cause is poverty. When countries begin to prosper their birth-rate goes down. Children are the only social security in poor countries. Forget about birth control. Even if free condoms are available, as in South Africa, as long as people remain poor they will continue to have children. The logic is devastatingly simple. If aid is to do any good it must be devoted to sustainable (an over-worked word used in its proper context, for one) economic development. Development almost invariably follows infrastructure. Those of us who have worked in Africa and other poor areas have seen businesses springing up literally overnight alongside new-road building. Restoring the Benguela Railway (which the Chinese are doing in return for vast quantities of Angolan oil) will provide a continuous rail link from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

(Scarcely had I written the above when the Economist did a piece in similar vein. It makes the sound point that infrastructure aid went out of favour years ago as a consequence of loony prestige projects, corruption, and poor maintenance. For these reasons I have previously stressed that e.g. railways should be set up as companies, not government entities, the donor should retain a golden share, and management should be controlled by the donor).

In similar vein but requiring no capital investment a necessity is to create a business-friendly environment in beneficiary countries. This means going through the statute book and chucking out stuff that gets in the way of creating and running a business. It means a judicial system that deals with commercial case speedily and properly. It means solid legal backing for contract and for the sanctity of title.

Any chance of this happening? Not a lot. I was on a law reform project in Africa. Both I and my partner, a Cambridge don with vast expertise, zoomed in on the need for a business-friendly approach in any reform programme. The donor cut out every single reference in our project design.

So how effective is food-aid? Not much. Here is the scenario. A large consignment of maize is shipped-in under a food-aid programme and handed over to the home government to distribute. Very soon this starts to appear on the market. The effect is to depress local prices so the farmer does not plant because it is not worth his while to grow for more than subsistence. The next year there is a drought, but no buffer stock of maize because it was not grown. Bring on the next famine.

Corruption? A big factor in economic development if it becomes an uneconomic overhead i.e. the official gets too greedy. Corruption is a cycle. Its root cause is very low pay for civil servants, often so low as to not provide a living. Pay is low because the tax take is low. The tax take is low because with foreign aid accounting for perhaps 60% of the budget there is little incentive to improve revenue collection efficiency. And aid money cuts the fiscal nexus between rulers and ruled.

Any answers? Well, Dombisa Moyo in ‘Dead Aid’ reckons that all aid should be time-limited e.g. governments should be told that they will be helped for, say, 5 years, and then not a penny more.

But then aid brings control, does it not? And Britain’s aid budget is the  highest in the world by a long chalk on a GDP basis. That should cheer up the 15,000 servicemen being made redundant.

On the fiddle..........

Let me tell you about the insidiousness of corruption. Over a half-century ago I and my chum Clive were posted to the same regiment as subalterns fresh out of the egg.  Clive was assigned as ‘Battalion Messing Officer’ i.e. in charge of the cook-house. The Cook-Sergeant greeted him with the words ‘Usual arrangement about the milk, sir?’ Not knowing what he was talking about, Clive gave the standard young officer’s reply ‘Carry on, Sergeant’.

At the end of the week a brown envelope containing an interesting quantity of drinking vouchers was left in his office. Now, Clive was a bit of a Jack-the-Lad from  a famous family, and ran a dirty great Railton 4.5 litre vintage sports car, not easy on a 2^nd Lieutenant’s pay of 98p a day. This unexpected bonus was more than welcome and continued until he left the Army.

Here is how it worked.

The War Office specified a soldier’s daily rations. This included a quantity of milk per man. Now, soldiers don’t drink milk and in the normal course of events most of it would be poured away at the end of each day.

Thinking that this was a terrible waste the dairyman came to an arrangement with the Cook-Sergeant whereby only half would be delivered – more than sufficient – but the Cook-Sergeant signed for the full invoiced amount. Half the profit would go to the dairyman and half to the cookhouse staff.

Was this the perfect victim-less crime?

Clive retired a few years ago as Vicar of a pleasant rural parish.

Another ‘victimless’ instance came my way a few years ago.

The visa staff (local) in the British High Commission would track visa applications and when one had been approved, the applicant was approached and told that for payment of a ‘rent’ his application would be approved quickly. The applicant duly paid over a substantial sum of money,  which he could have saved if he had been honest. Both were satisfied.

In my book what is worse than hacking, phone tapping and leaking is ‘briefing’, the disgusting practice of politicians rubbishing their colleagues to the media behind their backs. Maybe I’m old fashioned. At school the ‘sneak’ was ostracised and often thumped. The ‘grass’, the  ‘nark’, the informer have always been particularly despised.

The best police force money can buy.........

‘The secret of life is honesty and plain dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made!’

Groucho Marx.

 

Well, kiss me neck! All this rass over the Old Bill on the take as if this were something new.

 

 

There have been bent coppers since the days of the Peelers. When Sir Robert Mark became Commissioner of the Met, he discovered that the Flying Squad had been corrupt since the day it was formed back in the 1920’s. But the saving grace for the Sweeney was that they were great thief-takers. In the 1980’s they almost eliminated armed robbery by operating a discrete shoot-to-kill policy. It has not been a major crime problem since.

 

 

He also found that the ‘Dirty Squad’ - Obscene Publications – was corrupt to a man, and he had to completely disband it.

 

 

But apparently pre-Mark, corruption was endemic. A very senior officer told me how it worked.

 

 

A new probationer PC joining his first station would find a brown envelope in his locker on the next Friday. He couldn’t give it back because he had no idea who put it there. He couldn’t report it to the seniors because everybody was involved. If he refused to play ball he would be ostracised.

 

 

So he might as well go with the flow!

Enter the Fourth Reich..

Peter Oborne's column in the DT today is chilling thesis that the recent bailout of Greece will cement a chain of events leading to the virtual colonization of poorer EU countries by the rich ones, namely Germany. Enter the Fourth Reich.

Whenever Northern Europe, with or without France, decided to create an empire in which its manufactured goods would be marketed to poor countries in exchange for basic minerals and agricultural goods produced by cheap labor, the plan failed. Back in the 1700's such a plan was the talk of the town in London with respect to how England's relationship with America would be forged. Similar dreams prevailed in the UK and Europe regarding Africa's enormous potential as a market for manufactured goods and a producer of food and minerals.

Most of Europe intended to implement this dream through colonization.

The Dutch, however, were content to simply establish trading centers to stock, load and refurbish their East Indies merchant fleet. Cape Town was established as a refueling and re-provisioning station and only took on colonial characteristics with the rise of Boer immigrants. The Dutch never intended to actually rule; no money in that.

Ultimately, they had to rule owing to the restlessness of the natives. Hence, Kapstadt, Batavia and New Amsterdam. Nor were the Dutch immune to generous self-helpings of Shanghaied mariners haplessly sailing the Java and South China Seas. They rapidly learned that Chinese labor was infinitely more productive than Javanese and Sudanese tribes-people.

Enter the Fourth Reich..

Peter Oborne's column in the DT today is chilling thesis that the recent bailout of Greece will cement a chain of events leading to the virtual colonization of poorer EU countries by the rich ones, namely Germany. Enter the Fourth Reich.

Whenever Northern Europe, with or without France, decided to create an empire in which its manufactured goods would be marketed to poor countries in exchange for basic minerals and agricultural goods produced by cheap labor, the plan failed. Back in the 1700's such a plan was the talk of the town in London with respect to how England's relationship with America would be forged. Similar dreams prevailed in the UK and Europe regarding Africa's enormous potential as a market for manufactured goods and a producer of food and minerals.

Most of Europe intended to implement this dream through colonization.

The Dutch, however, were content to simply establish trading centers to stock, load and refurbish their East Indies merchant fleet. Cape Town was established as a refueling and re-provisioning station and only took on colonial characteristics with the rise of Boer immigrants. The Dutch never intended to actually rule; no money in that.

Ultimately, they had to rule owing to the restlessness of the natives. Hence, Kapstadt, Batavia and New Amsterdam. Nor were the Dutch immune to generous self-helpings of Shanghaied mariners haplessly sailing the Java and South China Seas. They rapidly learned that Chinese labor was infinitely more productive than Javanese and Sudanese tribes-people.

Where have all the journalists gone?

Perhaps it is a sign of the decline of formal media and its influence that we don’t seem to grow the great reporters any more.                                                                            

In my book, the greatest of them all were Walter Cronkite, Edward R Murrow and Richard Dimbleby. Who can forget Cronkite’s sign-off ‘And that’s the way it is!’ or Murrow’s intro ‘This......is London’. It sure was; you could hear the bombs falling when he did his famous broadcast in the middle of the Blitz. When we think of the influence of the media today, what could compare with those broadcasts which undoubtedly encouraged the US to enter the war, when Joe Kennedy, the old bootlegger who was a Nazi sympathiser and Ambassador to UK, was telling FDR that the Brits were done-for? And the destruction of Joe McCarthy? That’s influence!

Although Dimbleby later became famous for commentating on state events, he was the BBC’s first war correspondent. Like Murrow and Cronkite he reported from the thick of it. He went all through the war, from the BEF to the very end. I well remember his unforgettable broadcast from Belsen on the day it was liberated.

All three were very brave men; alas, Murrow and Dimbleby both died in their 50’s.

Not forgetting, of course, the late, great Alistair Cooke, whose ‘Letter from America’ was compulsory listening for most of my life. He created a new broadcasting art-form. He met just about every great person pf the 20^th century from FDR to Mohammed Ali.

The last of the breed seem to have been the likes of Sandy Gall, John Simpson, Martin Bell and the indomitable Kate Adie. I still have this mental picture of Simpson being the first to enter Kabul dressed in a burqa – some big lady! And of him being struck by bomb fragments that killed his interpreter who was standing next to him.

Sure there are many brave reporters following recent conflicts but no great broadcasters in the previous mould.

By-the-by, the Economist this week-end is covering the decline of the mass media as we know it due to the rise of social networking, the internet, and the rest. Seems like they have been reading our blogs!

Hacking politicians is good..

Inevitably, the Establishment is muttering furiously about controls on the media (censorship, they mean).

I have two concerns.

First, is it wrong to expose abuse by our governors through hacking, phone-tapping and leaking? Is it wrong to expose John Prescott, who presented himself to the world as an ideal husband with a smart wife when in fact he was a lecherous old goat who pleasured his secretary in his office, an offence that would have brought instant dismissal if committed by a member of his staff?

Second, who has been hurt by it, apart from some distress to Millie’s family which was surely less than the ordeal they faced at the hands of defending counsel?

In my judgment exposing the follies of the high and mighty is not just a duty. There will be times when it is a positive pleasure.

Why should they not be hacked? They do it to us all the time. And the main casualty so far has been poor Dr Kelly, outed by Blair for telling the truth.

Goodbye, gutter press!

Men who spar with Government

To back their blows

Need something more than

Ordinary journalistic prose.

Yes, I know that you are sick of hearing about the Dirty Digger, but this story will run and run. Get used to it.

I will make two predictions:

News International will survive quite easily but it will sell its print interests. They are not big money spinners and the Times and Sunday Times lose £70,000,000 a year. They will be bought by Russian ‘oligarchs’, a euphemism used to describe businessmen who could not lay straight in bed. And the current witch-hunt will turn public opinion against the hunters. The truth is that the public just couldn’t give a damn. To them, this is mob-hysteria amongst the chattering classes. The public concerns are prices, taxes, jobs and homes – as always. So what, if the Assistant Commissioner at the Met is so thick he couldn’t go two rounds with a revolving door?

Restrictions imposed on press reporting will have no effect on the Red Tops as they don’t print any news, just tits and bums and fairy stories. If Dave really wants to make a difference I suggest two simple measures.

First is to select Parliamentary candidates through primaries. This will encourage MPs to look after their constituents rather than their public image. Second, prohibit foreign interests from owning a majority stake in any newspaper or terrestrial TV news service.

The real story is that the influence of the print medium is vanishing fast, and the news industry is literally changing before our eyes. The heyday of the press barons was the first 60 years of the 20th Century. The culture of deference started to crumble in the 1960’s which led to the brief reign of the Red Tops, but the high-water mark was the 80’s when the tabloids tortured the Royal family and ceased even pretending to report news. Now, the press is being superseded by electronic media.

TV news now included amateur videos taken from You-Tube and similar sites. They were used extensively to cover events in Tunisia, Egypt and especially Syria. The first reports of the end of Bin Laden were carried on Twitter. They have greater immediacy and seem more trustworthy and genuine than profession coverage, which can be rigged (I remember Sefton Delmer’s ‘eye-witness account’ of the mutiny of the Force Publique in the Belgian Congo in 1960, filed from the bar of the Elephant & Castle in Ndola, Zambia. ‘As I sit here in the bar of the Hotel Splendido, all around me men are dropping like flies’).

Then we have Wikileaks which will continue to torment our masters even if Assanje gets before the kangaroo court in Sweden. The excellent Al Jazeera is leading the way in using social media such as tweets, Facebook, and amateur video in its news coverage. We forget that the age of mass print media was quite modern, created by universal education. Prior to that news was transmitted – if at all – by word of mouth, by market place gossip, by pamphlets and other informal means. I believe that in the mid-19^th century the largest newspaper circulation was the Times with about 50,000. We are moving back to something resembling this, with news increasingly gathered and circulated by the public.

Being a liberal is not a sin.........

Chaos reigns in American politics. Nobody likes anybody very much. House Speaker John Boehner could help solve a number of problems,  but the Republican Right will not permit it. Boehner is ruled by factions constantly sinking their teeth into his tender hide. I bet he wishes he never took the Speaker’s job.

The media continues to comment, critique, castigate, exaggerate, spin, guess, and stress over every single word and action of key players. Surely, many other Americans share my contempt for hours of dribble sold as expert instant analysis produced by network (CBS, NBC and ABC) and cable  (e.g. CNN and Fox) broadcasts.  My solution is to send the news analysts along with elected officials on a three-year re-orientation program to drought-stricken Oklahoma.

It is impossible to believe that any of our leaders actually care for the public. Washington’s biographer, Paul Johnson, should be installed as Conscience of the House and deliver lectures to both chambers of government about patriotism, sacrifice and public service. Attendance should be obligatory and should include the Administrative branch as well. Sadly, this would not help as the model set by our founding fathers has long been broken and abused. Above all else, George Washington was a gentleman. It would be difficult in the extreme to find an elected official of Washington’s ilk in America today.

The saddest aspect of American journalism for me is the blatant lack of international news. Our CNN is a watered down, emasculated, politically correct and tepid version of what CNN broadcasts to England and the rest of the world. The BBC World Service News broadcast here is abbreviated, edited, and annoyingly interrupted by commercial breaks.

I am not familiar with the hundreds of syndicated political columnists in the US, but many are well respected and astute in their observations. Yet, they have a tendency to make predictions and analyses that are often off spec. I believe this is because the journalists feel a compulsion to say something important, sensational and revealing on an almost daily basis. Hence, they stretch their minds and often torture the facts. We know the rest.

America is also full of periodicals and websites of a politically analytical nature. These are scattered between right and left with some holding moderate ground. Examples include Politico, the National Review, Taki's Magazine, The Huffington Post, Foreign Affairs and many many more. We also have our think tanks that spill over into print and punditry. Wikipedia lists about 75 of them, although many of these are not exclusively political in nature.

It would be remiss to neglect the special political broadcasts on network and cable TV such as Fareed Zakaria's GPS, Gwen Ifel's Washington Week in Review and several other Sunday morning reviews of weekly events. Meet the Press, for example, has been broadcast for years and is still going strong. There is some outstanding journalism in these reviews that take much of their inspiration from the inimitable, Walter Cronkite. All of these programs offer in-dept follow-up of their broadcasts via on-line connections. One of my favorites is GPS which is sponsored by CNN. As of late, however, interviewees have been political hacks promoting the party line, i.e. the Obama administration. CNN has a liberal orientation.

Reputedly, network (ABC, NBC and CBS) programs are middle-of-the-road in terms of their political stance. The political right might disagree and charge the networks with liberalism. I doubt that anyone would have called Cronkite a liberal during his reign as America's number one newscaster, but he was. In those days, being a liberal was not a sin.

And now some good news......

The good news this week is two-fold.

First, medical experts now tell us that the advice to drink gallons of water every day is nonsense, and that too  much water can seriously damage your health. In fact, you don’t need to drink any fresh water at all because you get all you need from your cuppa and your food which is mostly water anyway. You certainly don’t need bottled water, which is less pure than tap-water, costs more than beer, and is environmentally unfriendly – all those damned plastic bottles littering the countryside.

And another thing.

What is it with the younger generation that they are unable to go anywhere, even on a bus, without clasping a bottle of Evian or some such rip-off?

I have always followed the dictum of WC Fields - never drink water; fish do mucky things in it. I always make sure that mine is purified by at least an equal measure of the Famous Grouse.

Second, the Healthnazis in government now admit that the recommendation on maximum daily alcohol consumption units is entirely fictional. The figures were plucked out of the air. Like most of their ‘statistics’, I guess.

This means that it is perfectly OK for you to have more than a sniff of the barmaid’s apron twice a week. More constructive was a recent study in Spain into why the Spanish have an unusually low incidence of cholesterol problems and circulatory diseases. It concluded that the reason was that they also have one of the highest rates of red wine consumption in the world. There was, however, a warning not to overdo it, and it gave the daily maximum units that you could safely drink. I worked out that it came to six bottles.

That’s more like it.

Further good news was that the pontificating, tax-dodging saviour of Africa, the egregious Bono, was monstered at Glastonbury for his hypocrisy. It reminds me of the Bono story that I hope is true.

He was performing in Glasgow. Then he suddenly stopped playing and started clapping slowly.  He told the audience ‘Each time I clap, a child in Africa dies’. And a raucous Glaswegian voice yelled back ‘Well, stop f*****g clapping, then’.

Deep heat in Texas....and the White House!

The American Southwest remains plagued with drought and searing temps. "Pray for Rain' posters are seen in front yards and on pasture posts. In desperation, farmers and ranchers are hoping for a hurricane, or at least a strong tropical depression. There are none in sight and I check at least three times a day. My online weather map covers the entire North Atlantic from Africa to Mexico. Nothing.

Hotter still is political life in Washington. Democrats and Republicans are miles apart in negotiations for a compromise settlement for raising the national debt ceiling. Although done many times in the past, reputedly 17 times during the Reagan years, the Republicans in Congress are shouting a resolute no. Why, because they do not want to concede tax increases espoused by Obama to help finance recurrent obligations and spending. A deeper, and more sinister reason may well be that they want to embarrass O and thereby weaken his reelection chances.

And embarrass O they will if the deadline for national accounts payable of 2 August comes and goes without definitive fiscal action such as increasing our debt limit. Moodys is already reviewing the status of the dollar with a view toward reducing its triple A status should no solution be found before the deadline. It is likely that this is a maneuver to put pressure on Washington to come up with a solution PDQ.

People and pundits vary on the danger we are in. Some argue that we have enough national income, just over 200 billion a month, to finance our debt of just over 90 billion a month. Others say no, because other spending commitments will erode monies coming into the treasury and the government will indeed default on some debts. Others argue that debt is a moving target. Treasury bonds, for example, will come due in August, but most of them will be rolled over.

Reportedly, O walked, stormed or strode out of a negotiations meeting yesterday. As I said, the heat is on. We live in interesting times.

The US press is perfect........

There is now widespread speculation that referring the Murdoch bid for BSkyB to the Competition Commission  may rebound in Rup’s favour by giving him the opportunity to withdraw  his undertaking to dispose of Sky News. As it happens, this is the only TV news that we watch, both BBC and ITV being both boring and PC.

It is said that he wants to transform it into a Brit version of Fox. This would really put the wind up the establishment, the BBC and the Guardian. Fox is the voice of the right that we don’t have here. If it achieved the same success here as in the US it would be a major force to be reckoned with. No-one speaks for ‘conservatives’  these days.

Rupe would have more sense, of course, than to try to introduce American style. Ranting windbags like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh would be figures of parody here.

There was a silly piece in the DT about how the press in the US is far superior to our disorderly lot. This is because in America journalism is regarded as an honourable estate backed by prestigious University qualification, whereas in UK it is a raffish trade. Professional integrity rules out the kind of cosiness with politicians that is essential in political journalism in the UK. The outcome is the American newspapers are vastly more respectable, authoritative, independent and trustworthy that British rags; superior in every way!

Yeah, right!

In my experience I would say ‘None of the above’. For starters, they do not have a national press, apart from the NYT, the Herald-Tribune and the WSJ. The local papers are distinguished only by their weight. Buy a paper in Colorado Springs and you will learn almost nothing about what is happening in the rest of the US and nothing about world affairs. They are almost all boring beyond measure. The writing is stodgy and discursive. The page design and general layout and appearance seems stuck in 1946, almost laughably old-fashioned.

The press corps gives the impression that it is overwhelmingly sycophantic towards Washington and the White House. I hear that Obama was most put out when he had his press conference in London and the hacks were all lolling around in their usual disrespectful manner, whereas in the US the all leap to their feet when POTUS enters the room.

                                                                                                                                

As for the ‘deference’ thing, my understanding is that US hacks need to be ‘accredited’ if they are to be admitted to the White House briefings, Government departments etc.  If you are naughty, you get your accreditation removed pronto and so you can’t do your job.

If there are American journos out there who deliver the same kind of kind of cerebral vitriol as Heffer, Randall, Oborne, Daley, Liddle et al I would like to hear of them. PJ O’Rourke probably comes closest.

                                            

The TV news programmes that I have watched are as bad as those in the UK. The best international news programmes I have seen are BBC World and CNN International. On the home front, CNN is unwatchable and BBC unwatched.

As for respectability, apart from the obvious fact that this is about the last thing we want of the media, my understanding (although I have never read them) is that America has a raft of gloriously outrageous rags that match our own (largely written by Brit expats, I am told, as American hacks won’t deign to write this stuff – or lack the necessary skills). They have the advantage, too, of defamation laws that sit very lightly.

Green news               

According to a BBC documentary, there was a massive tsunami in Wales in 1607 which wiped out the entire population of the area. Contemporary reports say that this was God’s punishment for Taffy’s sins. So forget about joining the Green Party; join the Church instead.

'What the papers say...........'

Amidst all the hoo-hah about Murdoch and the News of the World, it might be as well to put some of this into context.

The scandal was not exposed by the ‘establishment’ – not by the police, not by the politicians, not by the courts, not by the press watchdogs either at OFCOM or the PCC.

It was exposed by the media itself, primarily, to its eternal credit, the Guardian.

But why did the Times, another Murdoch paper, turn down the greatest scoop of the century? The DT took the MPs’ expenses scandal instead. I think we should be told!

Needless to say, the politicians including Dave have not been able to resist the opportunity to mouth-off about imposing restrictions on the press, giving the PCC and OFCOM more teeth blah, blah. In the DT the excellent Janet Daley had a rather different take; that there has been an unhealthy symbiosis growing up between politicians and the media over recent years  which has created a political environment in which the power of the media to make or break individuals, parties and government  is assumed to be a ‘given’. Unsurprisingly, the politicians now see this as an opportunity to put the beast back in its cage. Well, they would, wouldn’t they!

But is the assumption that the power of the press has grown, is growing and ought to be diminished really true? Is not the reality that the opposite is the case and that the print media in particular is facing a ruthless battle for survival. The NotW was Britain’s largest selling paper, with a circulation just over 2 million. Contrast this with the heyday of the Street of Shame when the daily (not weekly) sale of the Daily Mirror was 8 million. One or two papers are showing slight increases in circulation but the trend is inexorably downwards. The best selling broadsheet, the DT, has seen  its circulation slump from over a million to about 650,000. All papers have responded to the change by dumbing-down. Illustrative of this is the news that hit the front pages this week (including the DT) and was headlined on radio news that Beckham Prince of Chavs had produced another little chavette and devised another ludicrous name for it.

So how can it be that the power of the press has increased dangerously when its circulation is puny compared with what it was, say, in the 1950’s?

There are those of us who are old enough to remember when the media was toe-curlingly deferential –‘Has the Prime Minister anything he would care to say to the BBC about his visit to Moscow?’ That was the epitome of investigative journalism in the good old days. It started to go the other way with David Frost and satirical TV shows and probably hit its apogee when Peter Cook publicly humiliated Harold Macmillan when the PM went to see ‘Beyond the Fringe’. Enter the Dirty Digger with first his purchase of the NotW and then the ailing Sun. From memory, there were only 2 redtops  in those days – the Mirror and the Sketch. Murdoch set the pace and what we have today is a spate of tabloids with only the DT as a broadsheet. The redtops contain almost no news and miniscule editorials, so how come they can influence – no,  determine (it woz the Sun wot won it) - the outcome of an election?

As for the power of Rupert Murdoch, I venture to suggest that this is as nothing compared with megalomaniacs such as Beaverbrook, Northcliffe, Rothermere and the rest who dominated the media for the first half of the 20^th century. (It may be a little ironic that a new on-line paper has been launched in the US with the same title as the one so wonderfully satirised in ‘Scoop’; the Daily Beast!).

The press has been dying on its feet for the last forty years. Gone are the News Chronicle, the Daily Sketch, the Evening News , the Daily Star and many others, killed by crooked print unions and the rise of other news vehicles, firstly TV  and a plethora of new independent radio services, and in the last few years increasingly by the internet.

As for more press regulation, England has pretty well the most draconian libel laws in the civilised world. More regulation will mean more control by government. A free press and the House of Lords are all that stand between us and elective dictatorship, God help us all.

I have mixed with hacks over many years. They are larrikins, scallywags and top o’ me thumbs, and very, very good at their jobs. They are almost always good company provided that you are not tee-total. To suggest that journalism has lost its moral compass (to use an over-worked phrase) is nonsense. It never had one.

'So farewell, then, News of the Screws.........'

To quote Oscar on the death of Little Nell, ’At scenes so tragic I could scarce forbear to laugh!’

We are witnessing the death of a British institution, but I don’t suppose the mourning will last long. Time was when the ‘Screws’ concentrated on naughty vicars, cottaging Scout Masters, and respectable housewives running bordellos in Wimbledon. The undercover (and possibly uncovered) reporter of the latter would always end his piece at the moment critique when ‘I made an excuse and left’, a phrase that has achieved immortality. As children of the long-vanished ‘respectable working class’, we were not allowed to read it. It was reserved for Father, which of course made it all the more tempting and desirable. It had some good hacks, like Arthur Helliwell, and generally it was all pretty harmless and amusing.                           

Shame that the old girl was so utterly corrupted not so much by Murdoch as by the people who wanted to read its garbage.

Mountains of merde will be cleaned out of public life with its demise. The title may be sold one day, but at this time it’s ‘not worth a bucket of cold spit’.

So let’s try to devil out why the Dirty Digger decided to take such a drastic and immensely expensive course.

For starters, I predict that the shredders will be on reheat enough to fill an entire toxic waste tip, every computer will be cleaned bare, records will disappear and people will be scattered as sackings take place. So any police or public enquiry might find the gathering of documentary evidence a tad difficult.

Then it may well be that the whole affair has Murdoch fingerprints all over it, with the evidential trail leading dangerously close to young Jamie. At this time Rebekah Brooke survives. Why has she not fallen on her sword? Can it be that she knows where all the bodies are buried? (I really must watch these clichés).

Is she going to reveal all about her life and times with Dave and Blair?

I can’t wait!