Unsurprisingly the sharpest journalistic account so far of the unfolding Murdoch saga has come from George Monbiot writing in his weekly Guardian column 12/7/11. Precisely exposing the myth that the tabloid press somehow represents the voice of the much put upon working class, Monbiot reveals the real corporate interests that the News of the World, The Sun and other tabloids represent. Britain, like most countries has become little more than a play thing of global corporate interests and most of our press has a singular task to represent those corporate interests. In order to camouflage those corporate interests an elaborate charade is created whereby the language and concerns of the working class is used to cynically hide the real agenda.

No one unravels this charade sharper or more eloquently than Monbiot:

The papers cannot announce that their purpose is to ventriloquise the concerns of multimillionaires; they must present themselves as the voice of the people. The Sun, The Mail and The Express claim to represent the interests of the working man and woman. These interests turn out to be identical to those of the men who own the papers. So the right wing papers run endless exposures of benefit cheats, yet say scarcely a word about the corporate tax cheats. They savage the Trade Unions and excoriate the BBC. They lambaste the regulations that restrain corporate power. They school us in the extrinsic values the worship of power, money, image and fame which advertisers love but which makes this a shallower, more selfish country. These are not the obsessions of working people. They are the obsessions thrust upon them by the millionaires who own these papers. The corporate media is a gigantic astroturfing operation: a fake grassroots crusade serving elite interests.’

Bravo Mr Monbiot. And by way of substantiating this analysis Monbiot notes that of all the 247 News Corp editors in his global empire, every single one of them, without exception, supported the invasion of Iraq. So much for editorial independence. Even the mildly independent thinking journalists working for the Murdoch broadsheets will self-censor their work for fear of retribution. For them, it’s not so much a case of what you do write but rather what you dare not write. If I were employed by a Murdoch paper I would act no differently.
But the whole sordid Murdoch story, complete with endless revelations of corruption and criminality and cowered and complicit politicians is only the tip of the toxic corporate iceberg. The real story, yet untouched by the British media, is the power, criminality and corruption of the entire corporate monolith. Why won’t the politicians stand up to the food industry that has been poisoning our children with deadly levels of salt, sugar and fat for decades? Why won’t the politicians stand up to big tobacco who have been peddling their poisonous cancer inducing products to an ever younger audience with only a pretence at regulation? Why won’t our politicians stand up to the big supermarket chains that continue to resist regulation on their junk food products and cheap alcohol despite a relentlessly ticking obesity time bomb?

And there is much more to be appalled at. Why won’t our politicians stand up to the Co2 polluters in the energy and manufacturing industries despite ample scientific evidence that the planet is slowly but surely baking itself into oblivion. Why won’t our mealy mouthed politicians take a stand against the giant pharmaceutical companies that have been pushing their legalised drugs onto an unsuspecting and alienated populous without any regard to the long term effects of a nation addicted to anti-depressants and other mind-numbing concoctions? The list of corporate social vandalism and criminal misdemeanours is endless. What of our arms manufacturers who sell their weapons of death to any and every brutal dictatorship including of course the arch reactionaries in Saudi Arabia?

Where is the Cameron and Milliband outrage against the people traffickers that have silently reintroduced a modern form of slavery into this country? Where is Cameron’s and Miliband’s outrage at the near slave labour conditions that are used across the developing world in order to produce our cheap clothes and electronic gadgets? Why just the other day, Nike were exposed for using factory staff in Indonesia that were paid 30p a day and regularly beaten and abused for their troubles.( Well done Ross McGuinness of the London Metro 14/7/11 for exposing the real Nike corporation) Why are Rafael Nadal, Tiger Woods and Wayne Rooney and the rest of the army of Nike ambassadors silent on this ongoing corporate outrage? Of course Nike is not alone in this respect. I doubt if there is a single transnational corporation that does not exploit third world labour to magnify their corporate profits that is the ugly nature of global capitalism that Mr Murdoch would have us believe is the natural order of things.

Why won’t our elected representatives stand up and be counted on a whole raft of pressing social issues like the chronic shortage of social housing, the rapidly deteriorating rental housing stock, the crumbling, third-world public transport system? Their answer to all these mounting problems, both Tory and New Labour privatise, privatise, privatise. But don’t be fooled for one moment with the Tory rhetoric concerning ‘freedom of choice’ and the ‘big society’. We know that that is no more than a cynical corporate ploy to privatise our schools, hospitals and social care. And who benefits from all this privatisation? Not the working people of this country, of that we can be sure, but rather the same corporate interests that are busy trying to buy up every newspaper and media outlet on the planet, all the better to sell us their vision of unregulated global capitalism.

Our agenda and their agenda are totally antithetical. We seek social cooperation and social mobility; affordable health care, housing and leisure facilities; a non-polluting cheap public transport and a quality comprehensive education system. They seek simply a maximisation of profit. The two cannot be reconciled.

Now with the explosion of anger and disgust at Murdoch’s machinations we have a window of opportunity – a window that may stay open for just the briefest of moments. Now is the time to hold power to account. A social world or a corporate world that is the blunt choice facing us all.